[meteorite-list] 53 Meteorites Recovered Thus Far From Russian Meteor

[Ron Baalke]

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/18/world/europe/russia-meteor

Russian scientists track down fragments of Urals meteor
By Alla Eshchenko and Michael Pearson
CNN
February 18, 2013

(CNN) -- What was in that meteor that exploded spectacularly over Russia's 
Urals region last week? Radioactive spores? Tiny Martians? Kryptonite?

Nope, just rock and a bit of iron, according to Russian scientists who tracked 
fragments of the meteor to the frozen surface of Lake Chebarkul.

Scientists from Urals Federal University found 53 small meteorites on the surface 
of the lake and believe a larger fragment is under water, said Viktor Grokhovsky, 
the scientist who led the effort.

The fragments point to a rocky meteor with about 10% iron mixed in, Grokhovsky 
told CNN.

The meteor exploded Friday in the air near Chelyabinsk, leaving 
behind nothing but meteorites, thousands of broken windows and some pretty 
spectacular video of it streaking across the sky before exploding in a 
noisy, luminous fireball.

The explosion startled residents going about their morning business and damaged more 
than 4,000 buildings, mostly apartments. Glass shattered across 200,000 square 
kilometers (77,220 square miles), the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited the 
Chelyabinsk regional emergencies ministry as saying Saturday.

About 1,000 people suffered injuries, mostly from flying glass. One woman was flown 
to Moscow for treatment of a spinal injury, state media reported.

About 50 people remained hospitalized over the weekend.

Local officials have estimated the damage at more than 1 billion rubles ($33 million), 
RIA Novosti said. Chelyabinsk Gov. Mikhail Yurevich promised compensation to all those 
affected, the official Itar-Tass news agency said.

The U.S. space agency, NASA, said the meteor released nearly 500 kilotons of energy, 
about 33 times more than the nuclear bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, 
in 1945.

NASA estimated the meteor's diameter at 55 feet (17 meters) and said it was the largest 
reported since 1908, when a meteor exploded over Tunguska in remote Siberia, 
destroying 80 million trees over an area of 820 square miles.

"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," 
Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory said last week.

"When you have a fireball of this size, we would expect a large number of meteorites to 
reach the surface, and in this case there were probably some large ones."

The event was unrelated to the passage of another, larger asteroid some 17,100 miles from 
earth on Friday, according to scientists.