On Friday February 15, 2013 a small 19 meter wide asteroid slammed into earth's atmosphere over the Russian city 'Chelyabinsk" causing an Airbust equal to several nuclear bombs, the event was withnessed and filmed by thousands of onlookers and became known as the 'Chelyabinsk meteor'.
As the asteroid disintegrated it send massive shockwaves damaging good buildings and injuring hunderds of people trough broken glass or being thrown across the room. The airbust is estimated to have been around 500 killotons TNT which is 30 times the size of the hiroshima atomic bomb.
Here follows some actual footage.
FOOTAGE
the city of Chelyabinsk was unlucky to be beneath the meteorites flight path
and was showered with debris dropping from the sky
FOOTAGE
it's really a shot across our bow, both of them were, right, well one of them
actually hit us, all right, at least burst in the atmosphere, the other one is like
is a buzz cut to earth, and you can say well what do you do about it
well, if you live in a world without scientists and engineers the first thing
you do is you say let's run or hide or buy water and dig holes and live in them
but we live in a technologically fluent culture whether or not everyone shares
in that fluency and among those who know we have ways on paper to deflect
asteroids if we find them early enough before they come in, none of those plans
are funded by any agency anywhere in the world
so that's a whole other cultural political challenge that would need to
be overcome. For the moment all we're doing with the meager funds that NASA
has to do so and combined with some other funds around the world
is to define the asteroids and track them, now this one that hit Russia, yeah
tore up a town a bit but it's not it's not disrupting civilization and we could
get asteroids about a kilometer in size those are large enough and carry enough
energy into our system to disrupt transportation communication the food
chain and that can be a really bad day on earth and so we set up the criterion
to find all kilometer class asteroids whose orbit cross earth and we did a
really good job at it where we said okay let's go a little smaller how about how
about 100 meter asteroids let you map them now we know when they're coming, but
we still have no means to do anything about it
now the little ones, the one that hit Russia those will show up two
hours before they hit, and that one showed up just in the image, maybe the
military had a slightly earlier beat on it but nothing that you're not going to
evacuate a town in the time available
Are these flyby space rocks the greatest treath to life on earth?
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