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Subject: FW: Russia scientists call for prevention after space rock blast
Multiple parts of the story, below !
From:Subject: FW: Russia scientists call for prevention after space rock blast
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2013 19:49:22 -0600
ITAR-TASS
17:07 17/02/2013
Russia's Chelyabinsk recovering after Friday meteorite shower
CHELYABINSK, February 17 (Itar-Tass) – Russia's city of Chelyabinsk in the south Urals region is recovering after the Friday meteorite shower. Broken windows are being protected with films and plywood. Glass is set in many windows already.
The South Urals State University, one of the biggest ones in the region, plans to begin classes in Monday morning, as usual. The meteorite shower broke more than 1,500 windows with an overall area of 5,000 square meters in the building, Alexander Shestakov, the rector of the university told Itar-Tass. It is planned to mend all of them by Monday morning. Rescuers have already plugged all the holes in the walls, thus keeping the rooms warm. According to preliminary estimates, about 53 million roubles will be needed to completely repair the building.
The biggest damage was done to the Chelyabinsk zinc plant, where the meteorite shower caused a partial collapse of the outer wall and roof. The plant is located near a motorway, so the ruins attract attention of drivers. Some come here on purpose – to make a photo of this apocalyptic sight. The local traffic police had to install a round-the-clock post here to regulate the traffic.
Sports events that were suspended because of the natural calamity have been resumed. Thus, men's volleyball teams from the Urals and Siberia finally finished their interrupted tournament on Sunday.
Meanwhile rescuers from the Russian emergencies ministry are inspecting potentially hazardous facilities that were damaged in the meteorite shower. According to a spokesman for the local emergencies department, a total of 122 such facilities have already been checked.
© ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved.
ITAR-TASS
11:19 17/02/2013
Over 1,600 houses repaired after meteorite shower in Chelyabinsk region
YEKATERINBURG, February 17 (Itar-Tass) – According to the latest reports, "new glasses were put in the windows in 1,658 residential houses, 34 medical institutions, 62 educational institutions, four social security facilities" in the Chelyabinsk Region after the last Friday meteorite shower, the press service of the Chelyabinsk regional emergency situation department told Itar-Tass on Sunday.
The window frames and the glasses were restored on a total area of 37,800 square metres.
"Over 24,000 people and 4,300 units of machinery were involved in the cleanup of the aftermaths of the natural disaster. The firemen and rescuers from the Tyumen, Kurgan and Sverdlovsk Regions are working in the disaster area," the press service said.
A total of 4,715 buildings were damaged in the meteorite shower in the region. The damages are estimated at more than one billion roubles.
The meteorite shower was registered in the morning on February 15 in five Russian regions, including Tyumen, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Kurgan regions and Bashkortostan.
The places, where the meteorite debris fell down, were spotted in three districts in the Chelyabinsk Region, including two places in the Chebarkul district and one place in the Zlatoustovsky district.
According to the updated reports, over 1,000 people were injured, and 50 people were hospitalized after the meteorite shower.
© ITAR-TASS. All rights reserved.
FLORIDA TODAY
Feb. 16, 2013 11:51 PM
John Kelly: Meteorite should be a worldwide wake-up call
Written by
John Kelly
Space
Well, that direct hit of a meteorite in Russia, including the damage to buildings and injuries to hundreds of people, ought to get everyone's attention.
The threat of big space rocks slamming into the Earth and hurting people and property is very real. As the world gets more populated, the likelihood of the near-Earth objects doing harm rises. And, as evidenced by what happened in Russia this week, even seemingly small "space rocks" can cause substantial devastation.
Back in 2005, Congress ordered NASA to come up with a way to spot, catalog and track asteroids big enough to cause widespread regional damage — meaning a space rock big enough to level a major city. As with many orders from Washington, Congress provided no money for the job.
NASA was to divert funds from other projects to field a system by 2010 and use it to document 90 percent of all near-Earth objects wider than 140 meters across. The National Academy of Sciences even studied the problem and listed reasons (not enough money) and recommendations for getting a robust program started (more money). NASA concurs. No money means there will be no improved tracking.
For $250 million each year over a decade, NASA could put together an aggressive sky map program to identify 90 percent of rocks capable of city-smashing. Within that money, NASA could afford a first mission to an asteroid to investigate or test options for deflecting one bearing down on Earth — not just one making a near fly by as we experienced this week.
The funding situation hasn't gotten better as the federal budget tightened and NASA faces even more cuts to its core programs, let alone something that already was not deemed a high priority by agency leaders.
The odds are against a catastrophic collision anytime soon. Scientists estimate a near-Earth object of the size Congress wants tracked should hit the planet about once every 30,000 years. The problem with probabilities is no one can tell you if that 1 in 30,000 is coming next year or tens of thousands of years in the future.
Of all of the things that NASA does, many argue this would be a practical one. It's also talked about as one of the early missions for NASA's next exploration program.
The National Academy report noted that the public needed educating about the potential risks of near-Earth objects. The direct hit in Russia and the damage from the powerful shock wave is a wake-up call. That object didn't hit anything but ice, but did so with enough force perhaps to shake governments around the world out of complacency and into some kind of action.
Copyright © 2013 www.floridatoday.com. All rights reserved.
LA Times
February 16, 2013, 7:09 p.m.
Russia scientists call for prevention after space rock blast
As officials hunt for pieces of the rock, scientists say the event over Chelyabinsk is a warning to implement a monitoring system to better detect celestial objects and avert catastrophes.
By Sergei L. Loiko, Los Angeles Times
MOSCOW — As Russian authorities searched Saturday for remnants of the space object that startled residents of the southern Ural Mountain region a day earlier, scientists called its shock wave a loud warning that they hoped would inspire action to prevent potential catastrophes.
"When a small piece of rock would fall on the Earth 100 years ago, it could have caused minimal damage and would have stayed largely undetected, but Friday's accident fully demonstrated how vulnerable the technological civilization of today has become," Vladimir Lipunov, head of the Space Monitoring Laboratory with Moscow State University, said in an interview.
"It is high time for Russia to start heavily investing in building an advanced space danger monitoring and warning system, and above that, a system capable of destroying such super bombs falling on us from the skies," he said.
The scientist's remarks echoed concern displayed by government officials.
"Today neither Russia nor the United States is capable of shooting down objects from outer space," tweeted Dmitry Rogozin, vice premier in charge of the nation's defense industry.
What NASA described as a "tiny asteroid" wreaked havoc in the densely populated and highly industrialized Chelyabinsk region early Friday, its shock wave resulting in injuries to more than 1,100 people and causing millions of dollars in damage to buildings and disrupted phone and Internet communications.
The massive sonic boom damaged 3,000 houses, 34 hospitals and clinics, and 360 schools, as well as several businesses, officials said. At least three hockey games were canceled because of damage to the local rink.
Regional Gov. Mikhail Yurevich told reporters Saturday that damage exceeded $33 million but that 30% of the windows broken by the shock wave had already been replaced. About 20,000 municipal employees, emergency workers and volunteers worked around the clock to fix the windows in a region where the overnight temperature fell to minus-4 degrees.
Police have collected several small pieces of a black rock-like substance believed to be from the space object that broke apart as it exploded over the area, Interfax reported. Divers finished their initial inspection of Chebarkul Lake, about 40 miles west of Chelyabinsk, but found no traces of the object, a big chunk of which was believed to have fallen into the lake, breaking the thick ice.
The Chelyabinsk region has long been one of the most important military industrial regions of Russia, where you "can't drive a mile without passing a defense or a nuclear industry installation," Lipunov said.
"We should be thankful to fate that this meteor, in fact, was a blessing in disguise, and instead of destroying a significant part of Russia with quite dire consequences to the rest of the world, it sent us a clear warning signal by simply blowing up a bunch of windows and lightly injuring over 1,000 people," the scientist said.
Rogozin said that on Monday he would provide Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev with proposals on possible ways to detect space objects approaching Earth and reduce the danger.
Lipunov said his monitoring system of four 15.7-inch telescopes deployed across Russia was able to produce a high-quality two-hour video of the 2012 DA14 asteroid, a much larger space rock that coincidentally passed close to Earth on Friday. But he said his lab could not discern smaller asteroids and meteors, which can also pose a grave risk.
Many Russian experts say that government funding for a monitoring system should be reinstated and that it should be equipped with 59-inch telescopes like those in the United States.
"Americans can, for example, detect a dangerous object and calculate that it can fall somewhere in the Urals, but that doesn't concern them," Alexander Bagrov, a senior researcher with the Astronomy Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Russia-24, a government news television network.
Bagrov spoke in favor of creating an early warning system of satellites monitoring space for signs of approaching danger, but Lipunov countered that a space-based system would be more expensive and could take a decade to install, and even then it would not be as reliable as an Earth-based system equipped with powerful telescopes.
In the meantime, residents of the region relived Friday's momentary panic and congratulated one another for surviving what they termed "the apocalypse."
"I am being bombed from outer space by some superior force," one user posted on his social media account, recalling his immediate reaction.
"It was a fantastic feeling how we were all united by our common [doom], as everybody was sharing with everybody else how scared he was," another user wrote.
"As these people were united in their horror and their panic on Friday in the Chelyabinsk region," said Lipunov, "so the governments of the most developed countries should unite in creating a system of warning and global protection from surprise attack from space."
Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times
NYTimes
After Assault From the Heavens, Russians Search for Clues and Count Blessings
Small Town Meteor: A day after a piece of meteor apparently landed in a lake in the small Russian town of Chebarkul, residents gathered at the shore with a mix of awe and pride.
By ANDREW E. KRAMER
February 16, 2013
CHEBARKUL, Russia — After a brilliant flash illuminated the sky on Friday morning like a second sun, Alyona V. Borchininova and several others in this run-down little town in the Siberian wilderness wandered outside, confused and curious.
They followed the light's path to the town's lakefront, where they trudged for about a mile over the open ice until they came to a startling sight: a perfectly round hole, about 20 feet in diameter, its rim glossy with fresh ice that had crusted on top of the snow.
"It was eerie," Ms. Borchininova, a barmaid, said Saturday. "So we stood there. And then somebody joked, 'Now the green men will crawl out and say hello.' "
Russians are still coming to terms with what NASA scientists say was a 7,000-ton chunk of space rock that hurtled out of the sky at 40,000 miles an hour, exploding over the Ural Mountains, spraying debris for miles around and, amazingly, killing no one.
As the Russian government pursued the scientific mysteries of the exploding meteor, sending divers through the hole and into the inky waters of Lake Chebarkul on Saturday, residents reacted with a kind of giddy relief and humor over their luck at having survived a cosmic near miss.
NASA estimates that when the meteor entered the atmosphere over Alaska, it weighed 7,000 to 10,000 tons and was at least 50 feet in diameter, a size that strikes the Earth about once every hundred years, and that it exploded with the force of 500 kilotons of TNT.
The shock wave injured hundreds of people about 54 miles away in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, most from broken glass; collapsed a wall in a zinc factory; set off car alarms; and sent dishes flying in thousands of apartments. Broken windows exposed people and pipes to the Siberian winter; many residents focused Saturday on boarding windows and draining pipes to preserve heating systems.
If pieces of meteorite reached the surface, as NASA said was likely, they fell largely into the sea of birch and pine trees in this patch of western Siberia, now blanketed in snow.
Lake Chebarkul is one of four sites that the government believes felt a significant impact, the minister of emergency situations, Vladimir Puchkov, told the Interfax news agency.
As the sun rose there on Saturday, the snow crystals sparkling like a million tiny mirrors, steam wafted from the ice crater, apparently related to the work of the divers, but the lake yielded few clues.
Mr. Puchkov later said the divers had found nothing on the lake bed, but had not ruled out meteor shrapnel as the cause of the hole.
"Experts are studying all possible places of impact," he said. "We have no reports of confirmed discoveries."
A meteorite fragment could help scientists better apprehend the composition of the meteor, perhaps shedding light on how close it was to descending further before exploding from the heat or to hitting the surface. Such circumstances could have caused vastly more casualties in this rust-belt region of military and industrial towns, a major nuclear research site and waste repository, and other delicate infrastructure.
In Chelyabinsk, the worst-hit town, most who sought medical attention had been released from hospitals by Saturday, the Ministry of Health reported. A total of 1,158 people, including 298 children, sought medical care. Of those, 52 were hospitalized. On Saturday afternoon, 12 adults and 3 children remained in hospitals.
Health officials evacuated to Moscow a woman who had broken two vertebrae after falling down stairs. One man's finger was cut off by broken glass.
Overshadowing these misfortunes, a fourth-grade teacher in Chelyabinsk, Yulia Karbysheva, was being hailed as a hero for saving 44 children from glass cuts by ordering them to hide under their desks when she saw the flash. Having no idea what it was, she executed a duck-and-cover drill from the cold war era.
Ms. Karbysheva, who remained standing, was seriously lacerated when glass severed a tendon in one of her arms, Interfax reported; not one of her students suffered a cut.
In its 32-second terminal plunge into Siberia, the meteor left a smoke contrail in the sky that twirled in a diabolical, turbulent wake. Some witnesses described an unbearably bright light, and the feeling of heat on their exposed faces.
Tatyana N. Vasiliyeva, a retired accountant who was walking with her husband on the lakeshore here Friday morning, said she had looked up to see "a star getting brighter, like the sun."
"It was a fiery star falling right on me," she said. "And so I thought I should just close my eyes now."
But on Saturday, she was back at the shore, giggly and disappointed that the police would not let her near the ice hole.
Other Russians found different meanings in the event.
A hawkish deputy prime minister, Dmitri O. Rogozin, suggested that the world's leading scientists develop a missile system to deflect asteroids from Earth. "Today neither the United States nor Russia has the capability to shoot down such an object," he warned, according to Interfax.
In the Church of the Transfiguration in Chebarkul, on a hill overlooking the lake, Deacon Sergiy was in mid-service on Friday, having just closed the doors in a wall of icons symbolizing the entombment of Jesus in the holy sepulcher and the imminence of the Resurrection. Just then, a bright light spilled in through every window.
"It was like a new sun was born," he said. "This all gives us reason to think. Is the purpose of our life just to raise a family and die, or is it to live eternally? It was a reason for people on earth to look up, to look up at God."
He called the flash more significant than earlier signs he had noticed, like the time a white dove alighted on the church belfry, or when a cloud appeared above the church in the form of a cross.
Out on the lake, an ice fisherman, who gave his name only as Dmitri, shrugged off the event. "A meteor fell," he said. "So what? Who knows what can fall out of the sky? It didn't hit anybody. That is the important thing,"
A version of this article appeared in print on February 17, 2013, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: After Assault From the Heavens, Russians Search for Clues and Count Blessings.
© 2013 The New York Times Company
Russian Meteor Blast Bigger Than Thought, NASA Says
by Tariq Malik, SPACE.com Managing Editor
16 February 2013 Time: 06:30 PM ET
The meteor that exploded over Russia Friday was slightly larger than previously thought and more powerful, too, NASA scientists say.
The Russian meteor explosion over the city of Chelyabinsk, on Friday (Feb. 15), injured more than 1,000 people and blew out windows across the region in a massive blast captured on cameras by frightened witnesses. Friday afternoon, NASA scientists estimated the meteor was space rock about 50 feet (15 meters) and sparked a blast equivalent of a 300-kiloton explosion. The energy estimate was later increased to 470 kilotons.
But late Friday, NASA revised its estimates on the size and power of the devastating meteor explosion. The meteor's size is now thought to be slightly larger — about 55 feet (17 m) wide — with the power of the blast estimate of about 500 kilotons, 30 kilotons higher than before, NASA officials said in a statement. [See video of the intense meteor explosion]
The meteor was also substantially more massive than thought as well. Initial estimated pegged the space rock's mass at about 7,000 tons. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., now say the meteor weighed about 10,000 tons and was travelling 40,000 mph (64,373 km/h) when it exploded.
"These new estimates were generated using new data that had been collected by five additional infrasound stations located around the world - the first recording of the event being in Alaska, over 6,500 kilometers away from Chelyabinsk," JPL officials explained in the statement. The infrasound stations detect low-frequency sound waves that accompany exploding meteors, known as bolides.
The meteor entered Earth's atmosphere and blew apart over Chelyabinsk at 10:20 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 (03:20:26 GMT on Feb. 15). The meteor briefly outshined the sun during the event, which occurred just hours before a larger space rock — the 150-foot-wide (45 meters) asteroid 2012 DA14 — zoomed by Earth in an extremely close flyby.
Asteroid 2012 DA14 approached within 17,200 miles (27,000 kilometers) of Earth Friday, but never posed an impact threat to the planet. The asteroid flyby and Russian meteor explosion had significantly different trajectories, showing that they were completely unrelated events, NASA officials said.
Late Friday, another fireball was spotted over the San Francisco Bay Area in California. That event, also unrelated, occurred at about 7:45 p.m. PST (10:45 p.m. EST/0345 Feb. 16 GMT) and lit up the nighttime sky. Aside from the unexpected light show, the fireball over San Francisco had little other effect.
NASA scientists said the Russian meteor event, however, is a rare occurrence. Not since 1908, when a space rock exploded over Russia's Tunguska River in Siberia and flattened 825 square miles (2,137 square km) of uninhabited forest land, has a meteor event been so devastating.
"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 JPL said. "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."
According to the Associated Press, search teams have recovered small objects that might be meteorite fragments and divers are searching the bottom of a lake where a meteorite is thought to have landed.
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