The Strength of the Chelyabinsk Meteor

Look at the size of that meteor!
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February 15, 2013 was no ordinary day, it was the day of an explosion in the sky! For some it was also a very unexpected and stressful day. For those that haven’t heard, on that day in Chelyabinsk, Russia, a meteor exploded and injured over 1200 people! This all happened in a relatively small city so the injuries sustained weren’t high in number, but what would happen if it were in a dense urban setting?

Isn’t that unbelievable though? A meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 19 kilometers per second and exploded with a light 30 times brighter than the sun. I don’t know about you but I would definitely be scared out of my mind that the world was ending if I had seen that explosion.

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So what about all of this explosion talk? Glad you asked! According to new studies, the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion was comparable to the Hiroshima bomb, except multiplied by 30! 30 times the bomb that wiped out over 30% of the population of Hiroshima, some 70,000 people. 30 times a nuclear bomb! Holy cow! Did I mention that it outshone the sun over 30 times as well? How scary would it be if it got closer in the atmosphere over a populated area like Chicago?

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NASA surely is doing something about this right? Preparing missiles or sensors or something? More-so since they recently talked about a re-occurrence of the meteor of Chelyabinsk is 7 times more likely than they originally thought. In fact, Professor Peter Brown, a planetary scientist at the University of Western Ontario, who is actively involved in NASA’s study of the Chelyabinsk meteor says:

We should see something like Chelyabinsk every 30 to 40 years rather than every 120 to 140 or so — a factor of three or four more of these impacts than the telescopic data suggest.

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What does that mean? Are we heading towards a meteorite influenced nuclear warfare future? Will our Earth be constantly bombarded by meteor spectacles in our daily sky? NASA assures us that recurrences of the event are likely over ocean waters rather than populated areas, but still, I wonder. Maybe it really is time to venture out and explore space for new habitats to ensure our survival? For now… here’s a compilation of Chelyabinsk meteor explosions as captured by civilians and enthusiasts alike! Cheers!