The meteor shower that passed over the Urals on February 15 showed how vulnerable and defenseless humanity is to the cosmic threat. The meteorite that exploded over Chelyabinsk, luckily did not lead to human casualties, although the number of victims exceeded a thousand people. Most of them escaped with minor injuries: bruises and cuts, however, 2 people received more serious injuries and are in intensive care. The damage from the fall of the meteorite has already been estimated at about 1 billion rubles.
The main damage in the Chelyabinsk region was associated with the consequences of a meteorite explosion in the sky, the shock wave caused a large number of broken glass and window frames, and in some places caused more serious damage to buildings. In total, 3,724 buildings were damaged in the region, of which 671 were educational institutions, 69 cultural objects, 11 socially significant institutions, 5 objects of a sports and recreation complex. The total area of the knocked-out glazing exceeded 200 thousand square meters. In this regard, the main emphasis was placed on the restoration of houses, the installation of double-glazed windows. In Chelyabinsk, 1147 people applied for medical help, including 200 children, 50 people were hospitalized.
Restoration work in the region is being carried out according to the schedule and during Saturday 1/3 of all broken windows have already been restored. Within a week, all damaged glazing will be restored in full, with the exception of a number of stained-glass windows in buildings built in the Soviet years, but this process will take no more than 2 weeks, the head of the region Mikhail Yurevich told reporters about this. Also, the governor of the Chelyabinsk region denied information that Chelyabinsk residents, hoping for compensation, themselves broke the windows in their houses. According to Yurevich, the damage from a meteorite fall could exceed 1 billion rubles. According to him, the Ural Lightning Ice Palace alone suffered about 200 million rubles of damage. It is the ice palace that is the most damaged building; 3 cross beams and supporting structures were damaged in it.
The fact that fragments of a celestial body have not yet been found on earth gives reason to believe that the unexpected visitor consisted of ice, and not of stone or iron, says Vladislav Leonov, an employee of the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. According to him, it was a fireball: an atmospheric phenomenon that can be observed from Earth when a large celestial body invades the planet's atmosphere. Most likely, it was the nucleus of a comet, since only a celestial body of a cometary composition, belonging to the nuclei of the 1st generation, could create shock destruction without leaving any traces of a striker. The thing is that such nuclei consist of ice, as well as dust particles and volatile compounds, which are completely dispersed after impact at high speed with a characteristic sound accompaniment.
NASA experts came to the conclusion that the power of the explosion that occurred at the moment the meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere turned out to be much higher than previously thought - about 0.5 megatons, which is 30 times more than the amount of energy that was released during the explosion of the atomic bomb that was dropped by the Americans on Hiroshima in 1945. According to NASA experts, events of this magnitude occur quite rarely - about once every 100 years.
The train, which the Chelyabinsk bolide left behind, stretched over a distance of 480 kilometers. According to Bill Cook, a representative of NASA's meteoroid research department, the celestial object that fell on the territory of Russia could be a fragment that separated from the so-called "asteroid belt" located between Mars and Jupiter, and turned into a meteor in the atmosphere of our planet. NASA representatives noted that it is extremely difficult to detect such an object in advance. For this, terrestrial telescopes had to be directed "at a strictly defined time in the right direction."
American experts estimated the size of the Chelyabinsk bolide, according to their estimates, the size of a space body when it entered the atmosphere was about 17 meters, and its mass reached 10 thousand tons. These estimates were made possible thanks to additional information that was received from 5 infrasound stations, one of which is located in Alaska at a distance of 6, 5 thousand kilometers from Chelyabinsk. The information received from the observation stations indicates that 32.5 seconds elapsed from the moment of entering the atmosphere until the car was completely destroyed. Experts already say that the Chelyabinsk bolide is the largest one that has fallen to Earth since the famous fall of the Tunguska meteorite in 1908.
According to NASA experts, the meteorite entered the atmosphere of our planet at a speed of at least 64 thousand km / h, according to the official website of the North American Space Agency. According to American experts, the explosion of a celestial body occurred at an altitude of 19 to 24 km. At the same time, NASA's data on the Chelyabinsk bolide are somewhat different from those previously cited by specialists from the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). According to RAS experts, the meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of about 54 thousand km / h and exploded at an altitude of about 30-50 km.
The Chelyabinsk bolide clearly demonstrated the need to protect the Earth from potential space threats - all experts agree on this today. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has already made a statement about the urgency of joining the efforts of leading world states to prevent similar cases in the future. In particular, he recognized Russia and the United States to join their efforts in the fight against "alien objects".
Prospects for preventing similar situations in the future
Specialists of the Russian Ministry of Defense noted the fact that the missile defense and air defense systems did not warn about the approach of the meteorite to the Earth, since the missile attack warning systems are designed in such a way as to record launches from the earth or water surface. According to the former chief of the Strategic Missile Forces General Staff Viktor Yesin, the military is scanning outer space before removing, on which the satellites are located. After the meteorite entered the earth's atmosphere, the military could detect it only if the presence of a celestial body in the air was not so small.
According to Oleg Malkov, a leading researcher at the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, an object dangerous for the Earth was missed for the reason that very little attention is currently paid to the study of small celestial bodies. In order to warn the inhabitants of cities in advance about a meteorite falling, it is necessary to deploy a whole network of specialized telescopes that would automatically search for such celestial bodies. At the same time, Malkov noted that these telescopes are now in the United States, but they could not detect a meteorite falling on Chelyabinsk. Experts believe that the meteorite approached the Earth from the direction of the sun, which means that it was almost impossible to see it from the surface of the Earth.
Faina Rubleva, director of the Moscow Planetarium, told reporters that scientists can observe such objects only at night, while its fall happened in the morning. According to the head of the EMERCOM of Russia Vladimir Puchkov, at present, scientists have not yet created such equipment that would allow them to track small celestial bodies that move at speeds up to 8 km / sec. At the same time, Puchkov emphasized that, taking into account the meteor shower that had passed over the Urals, work would begin in Russia to improve detection systems, as well as prompt response in case of similar situations in the future.
In turn, Igor Korotchenko, who is the editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine, in an interview with the Voice of Russia radio station expressed skepticism about the development of systems for the possible interception of meteorites. According to him, at the modern technical level, for about the next seven decades, or perhaps a hundred, we will not have created means of intercepting such objects. This means that humanity is defenseless against the cosmic threat. These are the realities of today. At the present level of its development, mankind and the scientific and technological progress achieved by it are not able to develop reliable means of detecting and intercepting asteroids that would pose a threat to our planet.
To solve this problem, it is necessary to concentrate all scientific potential, as well as synergy, the addition of existing potentials, since the threat is really real. It is worth noting that even last year, 2 Russian high-ranking officials spoke out on this matter. The first to talk about the asteroid threat is Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin. For the first time, he spoke about it while still being Russia's representative in NATO, when he suggested that instead of creating a European missile defense system, he should do more real things from the point of view of the security of the entire planet. The second Russian official who spoke about the asteroid threat is Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Security Council. Speaking last year in St. Petersburg to his colleagues, the secretaries of the Security Council of the leading countries of the world, he said that this threat is urgent. Then both statements were faced with jerking like "what do we predict and what do we do"? In fact, it turns out that both officials were right.
Russia was also lucky that the meteorite was not so large and burned up when it entered the atmosphere of our planet. But it is very easy to imagine the consequences in the event of a repetition of the Tunguska meteorite today. Just in the evening of the same day - February 15 - the Earth missed a large asteroid with a diameter of about 45 meters, which flew at the closest distance during the observation period - at an altitude of 27 thousand kilometers, below the orbits of geostationary satellites (an altitude of 35-40 thousand kilometers). If such a celestial body collided with the Earth, the consequences would be catastrophic and comparable to the fall of the Tunguska meteorite. Currently, scientists have discovered the asteroid Apophis, which has a diameter of about 325 meters. There is no threat of a collision of the Earth with it, but if this happened, the energy of the explosion would correspond to the detonation of all nuclear weapons available on Earth, which would lead to a planetary catastrophe.
In general, it can be noted that Chelyabinsk and Russia, and the whole planet, were lucky this time. As the saying goes, what is good is what ends well and this is exactly the case. The news about the Chelyabinsk bolide immediately became the main world news, thanks to which many foreigners generally learned about the existence of Chelyabinsk. The fact that this happened on Friday and there were no casualties quickly made the event the subject of jokes and Internet memes, blowing up the blogosphere. And the fact that it all happened over Chelyabinsk, which was previously considered a rather "harsh" city in Russia, only contributed to the emergence of new jokes on this score. It is worth noting that the events that have taken place have once again demonstrated the ability of Russian people to laugh even at rather serious things and take everything with irony, and this is even more important than some hypothetical anti-asteroid defense, which may not be able to be deployed in our lifetime.
