FIRE IN THE SKY: Bright Meteor Streaks Over Black Sea Near Ukraine! [VIDEO]

© YouTube/asteroid457

March 11, 2016 - UKRAINE - Bright meteor streaks over Black Sea caught by video observation stations in Mayaki and Odessa, Ukraine on 9th March 2016.


WATCH: Bright meteor over Black Sea.

- YouTube.

 

FIRE IN THE SKY: Mysterious Glowing Fireball Baffles Residents Of Las Vegas And California! [VIDEOS]

March 9, 2016 - UNITED STATES - What was this bright burning light striking the sky of Las Vegas and northern California on March 6, 2016?

It looks like a giant fireball disintegrating in the skies... But wait a minute...


WATCH: Fireball over Las Vegas.

This gigantic fireball is much too slow and remains incandescent for much too much time.

The northern California dashcam video is less clear than this first footage. You see a faint ball of fire as the car turns on the right. But the moving light is too far away to clearly determine its origin:


 WATCH: Large meteor over southern California.

So what are these mysterious lights in the sky?

Let's say that the burning object in the northern California video is a real meteor falling down to Earth on March 6, 2016.

But what about the event filmed over Las Vegas? No meteor will burn so long in our atmosphere.

I didn't get any visits of some green aliens and it doesn't seem to me these are fireworks.

I thus guess this is the re-entry of a man-made space object.

Looking at aerospace.org, there is this rocket body from Chinese Mission Yaogan 10 that is supposed to re-enter tomorrow. But maybe the event occurred a bit faster than predicted. - Strange Sounds.

FIRE IN THE SKY: Large Meteor Fireball Caught On Dash Cam In Missouri! [VIDEO]

© Screenshot via KY3.com

March 8, 2016 - MISSOURI, UNITED STATES - KY3 viewer Tim Zikowsky was setting up a dash cam on his way to work, and caught the meteor falling from the sky.

WATCH: Fireball over Missouri.

- KY3.

FIRE IN THE SKY: SETI Institute - Newly Discovered Meteor Shower Points To "POTENTIALLY HAZARDOUS COMET"!

This is an artist's illustration of a meteor shower on New Year’s Eve.  Danielle Futselaar/SETI Institute

March 6, 2016 - SPACE - While Earth can breathe easy for now, the SETI Institute and other astronomers are on the lookout for a "potentially hazardous" comet that may in the distant future pose a threat to our planet.

The search comes after a new meteor shower was spotted around New Year's Eve. It has never been seen before or tracked in radar observations. Calculations of the stream show the Earth is safe for the foreseeable future, but astronomers will be on the lookout for the parent body.

"In a way, the shower helped chase bad spirits away," said SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens in a statement. "Now we have an early warning that we should be looking for a potentially hazardous comet in that orbit."

The direction from which the new meteor shower approached. Credit: Peter Jenniskens/SETI Institute

The shower was seen in New Zealand with a network of video surveillance camera. It is called the Volantids after the constellation Volans (flying fish). As is traditional with meteor showers, it is named after the spot in the sky from which the meteors appear to emanate.

Meteor showers are in themselves regular and harmless events, but are being used in a new video surveillance project to find comets that could be dangerous to our planet. The project is a collaboration between Jenniskens and Jack Baggaley, a physics professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

"New Zealand, lying between 35 and 47 degrees southern latitude, has a long tradition of meteor studies," says Baggaley. "While radar observations in the past were efficient at observing sporadic meteors, the video cameras can see the meteor showers really well."

"In a way, the shower helped chase bad spirits away," said SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens in a statement.
"Now we have an early warning that we should be looking for a potentially hazardous comet in that orbit."

The network includes 32 video cameras at two stations on New Zealand's South Island, operated by amateur meteor astronomers Peter Aldous at Geraldine and Ian Crumpton at West Melton. The information is then sent to the SETI Institute, and Jenniskens performs calculations on the meteors' path. The parent body, astronomers added, may be hard to find because its orbit is so highly inclined to the Earth.

A study based on this data was submitted for publication in the Journal of the International Meteor Organization, showing 21 Volantid trajectories on Dec. 31 and two on Jan. 1. - Discovery News.

FIRE IN THE SKY: "As Bright As The Moon" - Large, Bright Meteor Fireball Seen From Maine To Philadelphia!

File photo of Taurid meteor showers. © Ame Danielsen.

March 4, 2016 - UNITED STATES - Keep your eyes on the skies.

Wednesday night, just before 10 p.m., sky-watchers from Maine to Philadelphia — and more than a few in the Lower Hudson Valley — caught a glimpse of a fireball, a meteor, burning up to dust as it entered the Earth's atmosphere.

The American Meteor Society keeps a map of public meteor sightings and, according to Operations Manager Mike Hankey, about 34 reports were received from across the Northeast, including one from Dobbs Ferry and another from Ardsley.

"It seemed to burn out at a low angle above the horizon," said Andrew Ploski, of Nyack. "My 9-year-old son and I were traveling back home last night after a visit with his grandmother in Yonkers. We were traveling north on the Sprain Brook Parkway near the Ardsley Road overpass. There appeared a large, very bright fireball with trail about the brightness and size of a car headlight. It streaked across my field of vision very quickly from my upper right to lower left — east to west."

Ploski was lucky, according to seasoned sky-watchers. "To see a meteor in Westchester is a little bit unusual," said Larry Faltz, president of Westchester Amateur Astronomers. "You have to be looking up at just the right moment."

Faltz explained that, when you see a fireball in the sky, you are not actually seeing a meteor but the ionization of the Earth's atmosphere as the object heads toward the ground. For that fireball effect to be visible, an object only needs to be as big as a grain of sand.

"It's impossible to say how big it was," Hankey said, though he speculated — considering reports from public sources that described the fireball as "about as bright as the moon" — that it was "a significantly bigger rock," perhaps "as large as a basketball."

Brother Robert Novak, chairman of the Physics Department at Iona College in New Rochelle, said visible meteors are not all that uncommon in the Lower Hudson Valley, but that it tends to be more common when there is a meteor shower like the Perseids in August or the Leonids near Thanksgiving.

This chart shows the number of reports of meteor sightings per day by public sources to the American Meteor Society.© AMS

"They follow two cycles," he said. "One is a yearly cycle. The other cycle depends on the meteor itself." "Rogue meteors," Novak said, are far more rare and more unpredictable. "From time to time they come into the Earth's atmosphere," he said.

But it's not unheard of. Hankey there was a similar event, recently, also in the Northeast not too long ago. 'We had an event about a month ago in the same region that generated almost 900 reports," he said.

Faltz explained that "A 'meteor' is what we see in the sky. If it hits the ground, which only a few of the larger ones do, it's a 'meteorite.'" Uncommon as they may be, The Lower Hudson Valley has experienced an actual meteor.

"There was a large one that smashed into a car in Peekskill in 1992," Falz said. "The car sold a few years ago for $69,000." - The Journal News.

FIRE IN THE SKY: Meteor-Fireball Over Scotland - Reports Of A Large White Light, Followed By Rumbling "BANG" And The Shaking Of Buildings! [VIDEOS]

YouTube screen capture.

February 29, 2016 - SCOTLAND - A large white light and rumbling "bang" have been reported in the skies over the north east of Scotland, prompting speculation on social media about the cause.

Reports came in of a large white flash in the sky around 7pm on Monday, with Twitter users across the Highlands, Aberdeenshire and Perth saying they had witnessed the phenomenon.

Sky: There was speculation the phenomenon could be a meteor. © STV

Some speculated the flashes and noises had been caused by a meteor. Others reported feeling buildings shake as a result of the bang.

Police Scotland said they had been unable to ascertain the cause of the noise.

@STVNews was that a meteor hit heard all over scotland!

— joanne pittendreigh (@jojopittbear) February 29, 2016

Proper massive rumble, ground shaking, folk seeing the sky flash blue and sirens going off everywhere....is this the end?! 😮

— Kim Paterson (@kp_x_) February 29, 2016

The Met Office said there were no lightning or thunderstorms in the area.

STV News weather presenter Sean Batty said the flash appeared to be from a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, lighting up a sheet of cloud.

A spokesman for Police Scotland said: "We've had reports of a very loud bang but we've been unable to establish what it is.


WATCH: Fireball over Scotland.

"Some people were saying their houses were shaking."

He said there had been no reports of aircraft in distress in the area from air traffic control. - STV.

FIRE IN THE SKY: NASA Changes Mind - Says There Is "A CHANCE" Asteroid TX68 Could SMASH INTO EARTH; Celestial Body Expected To Fly At A Close Distance Of 11,000 MILES Of The Planet!

February 28, 2016 - SPACE - NASA has dramatically changed its mind about the risks posed by asteroid 2013 TX68 , a 100ft-wide rock which is currently heading towards Earth.

It said there was "a chance" it could plough into our planet next year when it makes another flyby.

However, we are glad to report that NASA thinks the odds of a collision on September 28, 2017, are "no more than 1-in-250-million".

It it did hit the planet, the asteroid would probably explode in the atmosphere, unleashing as much energy as a powerful nuclear bomb and wiping out anything unlucky enough to be beneath it.


WATCH: Humanity is expected to survive its close encounter with a space rock next week - but we're not out of danger just yet.

"The possibilities of collision on any of the three future flyby dates are far too small to be of any real concern," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for near earth orbit studies .

"I fully expect any future observations to reduce the probability even more."

Asteroid 2013 TX68 orbit calculations refined with add'l observations; new calcs rule out any threat for 100 yrs. https://t.co/ZZc376w06u

— Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) February 26, 2016

Late last night, NASA published a tweet in which it claimed that Earth would be safe from this asteroid for at least the next century.

However, astronomers cannot precisely predict its movements and have given it a "condition code" of eight out of a possible 10, which means they cannot accurately predict its movements.

Experts cannot say for sure whether the space rock will zoom by at the terrifyingly close distance of 11,000 miles - or fly wide of the planet by 1.3 million miles.

"This asteroid’s orbit is quite uncertain, and it will be hard to predict where to look for it," Chodas added.

"There is a chance that the asteroid will be picked up by our asteroid search telescopes when it safely flies past us next month, providing us with data to more precisely define its orbit around the sun."

The asteroid has become something of an internet star, with one joker giving the space rock its very own Twitter feed .

It has also become the subject of a number of bizarre theories suggesting the world is about to end.

Some conspiracy theorists claimed the Messiah could arrive after the asteroid plunges into Earth, followed by a secret planet called Nibiru.

Others claim NASA is covering up the true risk posed by TX 68.

In a rather incoherent and badly-spelt response to NASA's tweet last night, one fearful man wrote: "100 years of notin!? If there was sumit wud ppl b told?

"Nope course the world wudnt be told cos world wud go insane!" - Mirror.

FIRE IN THE SKY: "Seemed Very Close To The Ground" - Meteor-Fireball Spotted Over Luxembourg And France!

File photo.

February 26, 2016 - FRANCE / LUXEMBOURG - If you thought you spotted an meteor above Luxembourg on Thursday morning, you probably did.

The French Meteor Observation Network confirmed the phenomenon, which was spotted around 10:30am.

It said that the meteor travelled over the east of France between Reims and Nancy.

Social media was buzzing with comments from people who witnessed the fiery spectacle.

American Meteor Society (AMS) Event#732-2016 - 'heat map' showing location of observers.© Google/AMS

Frederick R said: "I looked out of my office window while I was on a call and clearly saw a fireball with a tail light. What struck me was that it seemed very close to the ground."

The meteor appears to have started its path above Chalons-en-Champagne, heading north-east and disappearing between Marn, Meuse and Brussels.

The phenomenon occurs when astral or comet debris travels at great speed into the earth's atmosphere. - Luxemburger Wort.

FIRE IN THE SKY: "Green Flash With Long Tail" - Fireball Reported Over Alaska!

File photo.

February 25, 2016 - ALASKA - Interior Alaska residents from Fort Yukon to Eielson Air Force Base reported seeing a fireball overhead Wednesday about 7 p.m.

The fireball, which was captured on the Geophysical Institute's All-Sky camera, flashed briefly into view and disappeared.

One resident described it as a green flash with a long tail. Others said the tail also contained orange and red fragments.

It was visible for only seconds, they told the American Meteor Society, which tracks sightings.

Don Hampton of the Geophysical Institute's Poker Flat Research Range said, "It looks like a good sized meteor, but probably not a meteorite (which means it hit the ground.)"

Link to video on Facebook.


- News Miner.

FIRE IN THE SKY: Very Bright Meteor-Fireball Seen Over Spain - Exhibit Several Explosions! [VIDEO]

© SMART Project (screen capture)

February 24, 2016 - SPAIN - Very bright fireball over Spain on the 23rd of February, 2016 at 6:54 am local time.

The event was brighter than the full Moon and exhibited several explosions.

This footage was recorded by the meteor observing station operated by the University of Huelva at La Hita astronomical observatory (Toledo).


WATCH: Fireball over Spain.

FIRE IN THE SKY: "It's Gonna Be Close" - 100-FOOT Asteroid To Zoom Past Earth In Two Weeks; Expected To Fly As Close As 19,245 Miles To Earth On March 7!

February 24, 2016 - SPACE - An asteroid roughly 100 feet long and moving at more than 34,000 mph is scheduled to make a close pass by Earth in two weeks.

But don't worry, scientists say. It has no chance of hitting us, and may instead help draw public attention to growing efforts at tracking the thousands of asteroids zooming around space that could one day wipe out a city -- or worse -- if they ever hit our planet.

This one, known as 2016 TX68, is larger than an 18-wheel tractor trailer truck, and is expected to fly as close as 19,245 miles to Earth at 4:06 pm Pacific time on Monday, March 7. For comparison, that's less than one-tenth as far as the moon is from Earth, or 238,900 miles.

"It's gonna be close. But it's going to miss us. There is nothing to worry about," said Gerald McKeegan, an astronomer at Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland.

The distance of the March fly-by, which could end up being as far as 10.7 million miles away because researchers have not yet settled on its precise orbit, is also potentially closer to Earth than many of our weather and communications satellites, which orbit at 22,236 miles up in space.

It will not be visible to the naked eye. But if it comes in at the closest estimated distance, it will be the first time an asteroid that big has come that close to Earth in three years, since one at least 130 feet long zipped within 25,560 miles of Earth on Feb. 15, 2013.

This asteroid, which was discovered just three years ago, takes an egg-shaped lap around the sun, traveling as far out as an area between Mars and Jupiter, every 780 days.

The odds of it hitting Earth on its next pass, on Sept. 28, 2017, are 1-in-250-million, according to scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Fly-bys in 2046 and 2097, when it comes near Earth again, have an even lower risk.

"The possibilities of collision on any of the three future fly-by dates are far too small to be of any real concern," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. "I fully expect any future observations to reduce the probability even more."

In recorded human history, so far, mankind has dodged a bullet. But asteroids have bombarded Earth for billions of years.

Asteroid 2013 TX68 could fly past Earth as far as 14,000,000 km or as close as 17,000 km.

Roughly 66 million years ago, one estimated at 5 miles across hit Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, causing a cataclysmic explosion, mile-high tsunamis, earthquakes, immense fires, and clouds of global dust that blocked out the sun for years. The event, near the present-day town of Chicxulub, is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. It left a crater 12 miles deep and 110 miles wide.

On a much smaller scale, in 1908, an explosion in the air over Siberia, believed to have been caused by an asteroid or small comet, leveled 500,000 acres of forest and caused a shock wave equal to a 5.0 earthquake, but resulted in no recorded deaths due to its distant wilderness location.

"Earth is very much part of a cosmic shooting gallery. You never know on a given day what kind of chunks might intersect the Earth's atmosphere," said Andrew Fraknoi, astronomy chairman at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills.

"Most of them burn up miles above us," he said. "But every once in awhile, they make a splash."

In 2013, a meteor about 50 feet across exploded in the air above Chelyabinsk, Russia. It caused a fireball and shock wave that damaged 7,000 buildings and injured about 1,500 people, mostly from falling glass.

In this frame grab made from a video done with a dashboard camera a meteor streaks through the sky over Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers (930 miles) east of
Moscow, Friday, Feb. 15, 2013. A meteor that scientists estimate weighed 10 tons (11 tons) streaked at supersonic speed over Russia's Ural Mountains on
Friday, setting off blasts that injured some 500 people and frightened countless more. (AP Photo/AP Video)

Scientists estimate that asteroids the size of one in 1908 Siberia -- about 200 to 600 feet across -- only impact Earth once every few centuries.

The good news is that in 1998, NASA told Congress it would try and find 90 percent of the asteroids larger than 1 kilometer, or about 3,280 feet wide, that could potentially hit Earth. By 2010, NASA said it accomplished that goal and now tracks those potential "civilization busters." None are on course to hit Earth during the next century.

But there are countless smaller asteroids roughly the size of next month's or larger, which have gone undetected. NASA has boosted funding to search, some asteroid scientists say a dedicated space telescope is needed to learn more. If a big one ever was headed for Earth, and we had enough time, a spacecraft could potentially be built to nudge it out of the way.

"From what we know today, we are in the clear for at least 100 years," said Chabot's McKeegan. "There will be some close approaches, and there are some that have very small chances -- tiny fractions of a percent -- to hit us. We've been lucky so far, but there's a million that we haven't found yet." - Mercury News.

FIRE IN THE SKY: Meteorite Lands In Tamil Nadu, India - Killing One And Injuring Three Others!

The crater formed after the object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on the campus of Bharathidasan Engineering College, near Natrampalli, in Vellore on Saturday. © The Hindu

February 7, 2016 - INDIA - One person was killed and three others were injured when an object believed to a meteorite fell on the campus of a private engineering college near Natrampalli in Vellore district in northern Tamil Nadu early on Saturday.

According to police sources, a loud blast was heard near a water tank shortly after midnight on the Bharathidasan Engineering College premises in K.Bandarappalli village. Kamaraj, a college employee, who had gone to drink water suffered serious injuries and was declared dead when taken to the Vaniyambadi Government Hospital.

Three others suffered minor injuries. Window panes and wind screens of buses parked nearby and the water tank were broken in the impact of the blast. A crater was formed at the site of blast.

Though there was suspicion that it was a bomb blast, preliminary investigation by forensic and bomb experts showed no sign of any explosive substance at the scene. Pieces of a rare kind of stone were found and samples taken for analysis by scientists.

"We can rule out the possibility of any terror angle or sabotage. Not a single ingredient pertaining to any kind of explosive was found at the site. We suspect it to be a meteorite fall," a top police official told The Hindu on Saturday. After a similar blast was reported in a paddy field at Alangayam in the same district on January 26, a senior Astrophysicist of the National Physical Laboratory, Ahmedabad, came to the district for a study.

"The scientist was camping nearby and rushed to the college soon after hearing the news of the blast. We are convinced that it is a meteorite that fell with high velocity. In the earlier incident, local people remember having seen an object falling from the sky in the field," the official said.

A special team of the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad, led by Deputy Superintendent of Police Asir Vijay Kumar, inspected the scene and ruled out the use of grenades. Vellore Superintendent of Police Senthilkumari also visited the spot. Investigators were trying to check if the college had any CCTV camera covering the disturbed area. - The Hindu.

FIRE IN THE SKY: Close Call - Asteroid 2013 TX68 Could Pass Earth By Just 11,000 Miles, 95% Closer Than The Moon!

February 4, 2016 - SPACE - A recently discovered asteroid is scheduled to fly by Earth in March, but NASA can’t quite tell how far away it will be when that happens. One estimate is as close as 11,000 miles, about 95 percent closer than the moon.

The asteroid known as 2013 TX68, was first discovered three years ago, as its name implies, but the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey was only able to track its path for three days before it entered daytime skies, where monitoring is not possible.

That short amount of time precluded scientists from getting a better understanding of what the asteroid’s orbit around the sun looks like.

What is known is that the asteroid is 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter and will be in Earth’s neighborhood for quite some time, but what is not known is whether that means 11,000 or 9 million miles away from our planet by next month. For comparison, the moon is 238,000 miles away.

"This asteroid's orbit is quite uncertain, and it will be hard to predict where to look for it," Paul Chodas of NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies said in a statement.

Asteroid 2013 TX68 could fly past Earth as far as 14,000,000 km or as close as 17,000 km

"There is a chance that the asteroid will be picked up by our asteroid search telescopes when it safely flies past us next month, providing us with data to more precisely define its orbit around the sun," Chodas added.

The next flyby for 2013 TX68 will be in September of 2017, when it will have a one in 250,000,000 chance of Earthly impact.

By comparison, the odds of winning the $1 billion Powerball jackpot last month were one in 292,000,000. NASA predicts the following flybys in 2046 and 2097 will be even less likely to end in collision.

"The possibilities of collision on any of the three future flyby dates are far too small to be of any real concern," Chodas said. "I fully expect any future observations to reduce the probability even more." - RT.

FIRE IN THE SKY: Meteor-Fireball Streaks Over The Skies Of Wisconsin And Michigan - American Meteor Society Received Over 160 Reports! [PHOTOS + VIDEOS]

© YouTube/TODAY’S TMJ4 (screen capture)

February 3, 2016 - UNITED STATES - Multiple sources have reported seeing some sort of fireball or meteor over the skies of southern Wisconsin Monday evening.

The Muscoda Police Department caught video of the fireball on a squad dash cam facing east: That wasn't the only sighting.

University of Madison's Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences school also caught the spectacular display from one of their rooftop cameras.

The fiery space bolide was captured at 6:27 pm.

A professor from the school told TODAY'S TMJ4 fireballs like the one spotted in the sky Monday night are pretty common, although it's not common that they're actually visible.

WATCH: Fireball over Wisconsin.

According to the professor, the fireball could have been a meteor, a small piece of rock, or even space junk burning up in the atmosphere.

The American Meteor Society (AMS) received 160 reports yesterday about a fireball seen over Wisconsin and neighbouring states.

American Meteor Society

On January 30th 2016 there were 880 reports of meteor fireball sightings over Northeast US and Canada. - WTMJ.

FIRE IN THE SKY: "The Brightest Shooting Star I Have Ever Seen" - Fireball Sizzles And Then Fizzles Over Northeast U.S. Saturday Evening!

Fireball captured by dashcam of Alex Salvador at 6:17 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30, 2016. (Alex Salvador via Twitter)

January 31, 2016 - UNITED STATES - Scores of witnesses in northern Virginia, Maryland, and the District spotted a brilliant fireball dashing through the sky around 6:17 p.m. Saturday evening.

The fireball, defined as a very bright meteor, entered the region from the north according to reports.

Fireball captured by dashcam of Alex Salvador at 6:17 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30, 2016. (Alex Salvador via Twitter)

It was seen all over the Northeast U.S. and even southeast Canada. Specifically, Capital Weather Gang obtained reports from Baltimore, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, and Ontario via Twitter.

Observers described it as “huge” and “very bright” but then noted it fizzled, disintegrating into fragments.

“Saw a very bright white fireball streaking down in the night sky with a tail trailing behind it,” wrote Stephanie Rallins on Capital Weather Gang’s Facebook page.“

@capitalweather was that a meteor that just shot across the West Springfield sky? Bright green white flash and streak and then it was gone.

— WTFravel (@WTFravel) January 30, 2016

It looked like the closest and brightest shooting star I have ever seen,” added Michelle Calabro in Centreville, Va.

Alex Salvador caught the fireball on his dashcam while driving through Skyline area on Rt. 7 in Alexandria, Va. The camera was facing west. “This looks like something burning up, falling down around the D.C.,” he posted to Twitter.

The American Meteor Society, which tracks fireballs, encourages eyewitnesses to log a report with a description on its website. - The Washington Post.

FIRE IN THE SKY: "Extremely Bright" - Fireball Meteor Burns Through South Georgia Skies; "Significant Material On The Ground"!

File photo.

January 27, 2016 - SOUTHERN UNITED STATES - Dozens of spotters sighted a fireball burning its way through the skies of South Georgia and North Florida Sunday, and a Valdosta State University astronomer said it may have been a meteorite making landfall in the region.

More than 50 reports of an "extremely bright daytime fireball" around 10:25 a.m. have been submitted to the American Meteor Society, according to the group's website. Most of the sightings were to the east and southeast of Valdosta, though some sightings were made in the Tallahassee, Fla., area to Valdosta's west, according to a map on the website.

Dr. Martha Leake of the physics, astronomy and geosciences department at Valdosta State said she was alerted to the fireball by Dr. William Cooke, a VSU graduate and head of the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

"Apparently, Doppler weather radar tracked it down to an altitude of a mile," she said, indicating "significant material on the ground." Leake said the lack of sightings in and around Valdosta may have been due to the position of the sun at the time. The potential impact area would be south of Fargo in Clinch County and northeast of White Springs, Fla., Leake said.

"I suspect some of it wound up in the (Okefenokee) swamp or on farmland south of the swamp," she said.

AMS Event #266-2016 – Heat map of the witnesses and estimated ground trajectory

Maps at the American Meteor Society website suggest an impact east of US 441 north of Lake City, Fla.

The fireball was apparently a "meteorite fall," according to the website. A meteor is a stony or metallic chunk of debris falling through Earth's atmosphere; it takes on the name "meteorite" if it hits the ground.

Leake said meteorites fall into three general categories: Iron meteorites, more common stony meteorites, and meteorites composed of both stone and iron.

NASA provided maps tracking a fireball over South Georgia and North Florida via Doppler weather radar Sunday.© Jerry Richards /The Valdosta Daily Times

"Mostly likely (Sunday's fireball) was a stony meteorite, which would look like any other rock" except for being dark on the outside due to heat friction from falling through the atmosphere, she said.

Though falling space debris is reported daily, a daytime fireball is "pretty extraordinary," Leake said.

Mike Hankey, a spokesman for the meteor society, suggested people in the area check security cameras to see if they caught images of the fireball.

On April 29, 2011, several reports of a fireball in the sky over Lowndes County led to speculation that a meteor or other space debris may have been spotted. - The Valdosta Daily Times.

FIRE IN THE SKY: Eyewitness Descriptions Suggest Collision Of Two Helicopters Off Hawaii Were Taken Out By METEOR EXPLOSION - 12 Marines Were Killed?!

January 27, 2016 - HAWAII - All four life rafts from the two choppers that collided off Oahu's North Shore have been recovered, but rescuers have yet to find any sign of survivors. The search for the 12 Marines on board the two helicopters continued into its fifth day Tuesday, with Marines combing North Shore beaches for debris, while multiple county, state and federal agencies search for survivors by air and sea.

Navy divers have also been dispatched, and are using sonar technology around the last known position of the two choppers about two miles off Haleiwa. So far, they haven't seen any debris. The two Marine Corps choppers collided during a routine training mission about 10:40 p.m. Thursday, setting off a massive ocean search-and-rescue effort during one of the biggest swells of the winter season. Low visibility also hampered search efforts.

Ocean conditions are favorable for searching Tuesday, but surf is expected to start rising again Wednesday. The Coast Guard says there has been no indication that anyone was ever on the life rafts that were recovered. Still, the Coast Guard said Sunday that it remains hopeful survivors will be found, and in a statement Monday, Coast Guard officials said their goal is to ensure with "absolute certainty we've thoroughly canvassed every location we might find them."

On Saturday, the Coast Guard said it had found debris from the two helicopters in waters off Oahu.

US Marines and police discuss search and rescue options after two military choppers go down off Hawaii© HNN

High surf has scattered debris across a wide swath of waters off Oahu, from Kahuku to Waianae. "The debris that's been located is consistent with the aircraft of this type," said Coast Guard Lt. Scott Carr. "I know a lot of people are focused on the debris, but we're really focused on hopefully finding survivors." Both of the CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters had six Marines aboard when they crashed. Authorities said they did not get a distress call from either helicopter. Witnesses said the collision produced a fireball that lit up the night sky.

"It was like daytime," said Chase Tantog, 21, who was fishing at Chun's Reef when he saw what he thought was a meteor falling from the sky. "It was just a big fireball coming down," he said. "There was debris, too, on the side, like coming off. Once it hit the water, it just blacked out and then you hear the thunder roar after. It was really loud."

Witnesses recount collision

Residents up and down the North Shore saw -- or heard -- the collision Thursday night. Don Williams said the collision produced "two big booms. It shook the house," he said. "I couldn't figure out what it was."


WATCH: 12 missing after Marine choppers collide off Oahu.

Tantog, who was fishing at Chun's Reef, said the fireball in the night sky was so big "I thought the world was going to end." One woman said she was at Haleiwa Harbor on Thursday night when she saw what she thought was a flare. "I didn't see it shoot up, I saw when something was coming down." - Hawaii News Now.

FIRE IN THE SKY: The Chelyabinsk Meteor Strike Was A Wake Up Call For The World - Part Of An "Unexpected Twist" Of Anomalously High Incidence Of Twenty-Yard Long Rocks Hitting The Earth, Indicating That Asteroids Could Hit The Planet In Waves!

November 21, 2013 - SPACE - Consumer video cameras and advanced laboratory techniques gave scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February. The explosion was equivalent to about 600 thousand tonnes of TNT, 150 times bigger than the 2012 Sutter's Mill meteorite in California.

A Wake Up Call For The World.

"If humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs, we need to study an event like this in detail," says Qing-zhu Yin, professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at University of California, Davis.

Saying it was a "wake-up call," Yin says the Chelyabinsk meteorite, the largest strike since the Tunguska event of 1908, belongs to the most common type of meteorite, an "ordinary chondrite." If a catastrophic meteorite strike were to occur in the future, it would most likely be an object of this type.

"Our goal was to understand all circumstances that resulted in the damaging shock wave that sent over 1,200 people to hospitals in the Chelyabinsk blast area that day," says Peter Jenniskens, meteor astronomer at SETI Institute.
Their findings are published in the journal Science.

Based on viewing angles from videos of the fireball, researchers calculated that the meteoroid entered Earth's atmosphere at just over 19 kilometres per second, slightly faster than had previously been reported.

Sunburn

"Our meteoroid entry modelling showed that the impact was caused by a 20 metre-sized single chunk of rock that efficiently fragmented at 30 km altitude," says Olga Popova of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The meteor's brightness peaked at an altitude of 29.7 km (18.5 miles) as the object exploded. For nearby observers, it briefly appeared brighter than the sun and caused some severe sunburns.

The team estimated that about three-quarters of the meteoroid evaporated at that point. Most of the rest converted to dust and only a small fraction (4,000 to 6,000 kilogrammes, or less than 0.05 per cent) fell to the ground as meteorites. The dust cloud was so hot, it glowed orange. The largest single piece, weighing about 650 kilogrammes, was recovered from the bed of Lake Chebarkul in October by a team from Ural Federal University led by Professor Viktor Grokhovsky.
(A meteoroid is the original object; a meteor is the "shooting star" in the sky; and a meteorite is the object that reaches the ground.)

Widespread Damage

Shockwaves from the airburst broke windows, rattled buildings and even knocked people from their feet. Popova and Jenniskens visited over 50 villages in the area and found that the shockwave caused damage about 90 kilometres (50 miles) on either side of the trajectory.

The shape of the damaged area can be explained by the fact that the energy was deposited over a range of altitudes.
The object broke up 30 kilometres above under the enormous stress of entering the atmosphere at high speed. The break-up was likely facilitated by abundant "shock veins" that pass through the rock, caused by an impact that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago. These veins would have weakened the original meteoroid.

Yin's laboratory carried out chemical and isotopic analysis of the meteorites and Ken Verosub, professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences, measured the magnetic properties of metallic grains in the meteorite. Doug Rowland, project scientist in the Center for Molecular and Genomic Imaging in the department of biomedical engineering, contributed X-ray computed tomography scanning of the rock.

Violent History
Put together, these measurements confirmed that the Chelyabinsk object was an ordinary chondrite, 4,452 million years old, and that it last went through a significant shock event about 115 million years after the formation of the solar system 4,567 million years ago. That impact was at a much later date than in other known chondrites of the same type, Yin says, suggesting a violent history.

Jenniskens calculates the object may have come from the Flora asteroid family in the asteroid belt, but the chunk that hit the Chelyabinsk area was apparently not broken up in the asteroid belt itself. Researchers at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University in Japan found that the rock had been exposed to cosmic rays for only about 1.2 million years, unusually short for rocks originating in the Flora family.

Chelyabinsk belonged to a bigger "rubble pile" asteroid that broke apart 1.2 million years ago, possibly in an earlier close encounter with Earth, Jenniskens speculates. The rest of that rubble could still be around as part of the near-earth asteroid population.

Major meteorite strikes like Tunguska or Chelyabinsk occur more frequently than we tend to think, Yin says. For example, four tonnes of material were recovered from a meteor shower in Jilin, China in 1976. "Chelyabinsk serves as unique calibration point for high energy meteorite impact events for our future studies." - Free Press Journal.

Cloudy, With A Chance of Meteors.

Earlier this year, on the chilly morning of February 15th, a thirteen-thousand-ton meteor screamed above the Ural Mountains before exploding in an airburst seventy-six-thousand feet above Chelyabinsk, Russia. While the destruction caused by the shock wave was immediately clear—over a thousand people injured, thousands of buildings damaged—the scientific fallout is still manifesting. Combined with other evidence spanning the past twenty years, new reports indicate that we should rethink our notions of how frequent, and how destructive, events like this are.

The Chelyabinsk meteor’s dramatic entrance is just one piece of a story that begins deep in our past. We live among the flotsam and jetsam of a great storm that peaked four and a half billion years ago. In that storm—a slow-motion tempest of swirling gas and dust—Earth emerged as a rocky, metal-rich glob of agglomerated matter, coated with a thin veneer of atmosphere and water. Throughout its history, our planet has suffered sporadic bombardment by the remains of that tumultuous period, from the pitter-patter of microscopic rocks that burn up in the atmosphere to gargantuan asteroids that reset the global environment.

By human standards, the largest collisions are few and far between. The last time a six-mile-wide rock hit the planet was sixty-five million years ago, when it thundered into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula, creating a hundred-mile-wide crater. The climatological fallout contributed to the mass extinction of not just the dinosaurs but also some seventy-five per cent of all animal and plant life.

Impact events, as they are known, are much more frequent with smaller objects. We can expect mile-wide asteroids as often as every few hundred thousand years or so; when it comes to rocks about ten yards across, we get hit at least once a year. For our relatively recently developed human civilization, the problem lies between these sizes: every few thousand years, a boulder a hundred yards across can hit with the explosive force of more than fifteen hundred megatons of T.N.T.—enough to wipe a small country off the map. If the smaller Chelyabinsk meteor had come in above a city like New York, it would have injured many more than the twelve hundred it did in Russia.

Despite astronomers’ herculean efforts to detect and map all the potential threats—a catalogue of so-called Near Earth Objects now stands at just over ten thousand—we’re still unsure about the number of Chelyabinsk-sized bodies and how often they hit us. So while it wasn’t very nice for the Ural region, this explosive event has provided a remarkable wealth of new data.

Three new papers, published in the journals Nature and Science, provide fresh details about the Chelyabinsk meteor. Because no one was expecting the meteor, the majority of the data collected is thanks to our species’ narcissistic tendencies. In the studies published by Nature and Science, the researchers made ingenious use of public video footage from smartphones and security cameras to reconstruct the meteor’s trajectory as it tore a hundred mile path through the dawn sky at a speed of forty thousand miles per hour. Video footage also indicated the intensity of the meteor’s light, while audio tracks revealed the timing of sonic booms and the airburst shock-wave arrival. This feat of clever detective work confirmed that the thirteen-thousand ton, twenty-yard-long object exploded with a destructive energy thirty times that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, while recovered fragments showed that it was already highly fractured before hitting our atmosphere—a fact that allowed three quarters of it simply to evaporate at high temperature, preventing significantly greater destruction than had it remained intact all the way to the ground.

Researchers now believe that this rocky mass is likely a broken-off sibling of a mile-and-a-half-wide asteroid known as 1999 NC43, which periodically but usually benignly crosses Earth’s orbital path. This is unfortunate, because it means that other pieces of 1999 NC43 could be trailing in similar orbits, toward Earth. If these siblings are of similar size, we’ll be hard-pressed to spot them until they’re exploding in our skies. And, while previously we’d thought that objects the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor hit us once every hundred and fifty years or so, the researchers report that the methods commonly used for estimating the bulk sizes of objects hitting us may have been skewed.

Infrasound—ultra-low-frequency sound—detectors across the globe are used as part of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty’s monitoring technology, to catch illicit bomb tests. The same detectors can also pick up the pulse of atmospheric meteor events, and have been used to estimate the power and rate at which they happen. The Chelyabinsk hit was the most powerful infrasound event ever recorded by this system. With this data in hand, the scientists have dug back into the monitoring records, and have reevaluated the methodology used to estimate the power of meteor explosions. They found what appears to be a discrepancy in our previous estimates of how often objects this size will hit the planet: we’ve slightly overestimated the blast damage of individual impacts, but we’ve underestimated the risk of impact by a factor of ten, meaning that meteors like Chelyabinsk could be coming every fifteen to twenty years.

This doesn’t imply that the next dinosaur-killing giant asteroid is likely to show up soon, but it does suggest that right now, and for the past few decades, we may be and have been experiencing an anomalously high incidence of twenty-yard-long rocks hitting the Earth. This is an unexpected twist, because we’ve largely assumed that the rate of impacts by asteroids is generally constant—an equilibrium with a level of randomness is at least well-understood. Instead, this data indicates that asteroids could strike us in waves, the result of some unwitnessed breakup out in space. In the case of the Chelyabinsk object, analysis of some of the seven-hundred-plus recovered fragments suggests that this breakup could have happened a million years ago, during a period when the parent object, 1999 NC43, previously strayed too close to us. The tidal force of Earth’s gravity would have flexed this body and disrupted it, producing a family of smaller asteroids.

Does this mean that it’s time to take out asteroid insurance? Not quite. More than seventy per cent of the Earth’s surface is ocean, and our densely populated areas still represent a relatively small target area. But it should prompt us to get more serious about investing in ongoing efforts to spot these extraterrestrial objects before they hit us, and to think rationally about how to prevent that. - New Yorker.

FIRE IN THE SKY: A New Threat From Space - Small Fireballs With Diameters Between 10 And 50 Meters Poise A Significant Threat To Earth; Scientists Estimate MILLIONS Not Yet Detected!

November 13, 2013 - SPACE - On February 15, 2013, the world was awakened with the fear of a new space threat. The Chelyabinsk meteor entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia at about 0920 local time with an estimated speed of 18.6 km/s (66,960 km/h).

It quickly became a super-bright fireball over the southern Ural region. In fact, the light from the meteor was brighter than that of the sun. Observers felt intense heat from the fireball.

The Chelyabinsk meteor's shallow angle of entry almost allowed it to skip off the upper atmosphere and continue in heliocentric orbit. However, the angle of entry was just steep enough to allow atmospheric friction to slow its initial velocity below the earth escape speed of 11 km/s and below Earth orbital speed of 7.9 km/s.

This resulted in the object exploding in an air burst over Chelyabinsk Oblast, at a height of about 23.3 km.

The explosion generated a great deal of heat and a bright flash. In addition the event produced many small fragmentary meteorites and a powerful shock wave. Fortunately, the atmosphere absorbed most of the energy, estimated as the equivalent of approximately 440 kilotons of TNT. This is 20 to 30 times more energy than released at Hiroshima at the end on WW II.

Prior to the Chelyabinsk event experts thought near Earth asteroids had to be at least one kilometer in
diameter to be a significant threat to Earth. The unexpected explosive force of the Chelyabinsk meteor
has shifted more of the concern to smaller bodies with diameters between 10 and 50 meters.

This event demonstrated that a small asteroid could pose a bigger danger than previously thought. Astronomers have mapped about 1,000 such objects-between 10 meters and 50 meters in diameter in near-earth orbit, similar to the 20-meter-dimater asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk. However, astronomers think there are a million of these rocks that have not yet been detected.

Prior to the Chelyabinsk event experts thought near Earth asteroids had to be at least one kilometer in diameter to be a significant threat to Earth. The unexpected explosive force of the Chelyabinsk meteor has shifted more of the concern to smaller bodies with diameters between 10 and 50 meters.

This reassessment has increased the threat to human life from asteroids. Furthermore, small asteroids cannot be detected in advance of Earth encounter. - Space Daily.

FIRE IN THE SKY: NASA Says That A New Chelyabinsk-Like Meteor Strike Is SEVEN TIMES More Likely - About 20 MILLION Space Rocks Whizzing Around The Solar System Could Do Serious Damage To The Earth!

November 07, 2013 - SPACE - The meteor that shocked Russia in February when it exploded in the skies above Chelyabinsk shows us that the danger from space rocks smashing into Earth is much bigger than previously thought, an international group of scientists has concluded.

The 20-meter-wide meteor, which streaked across the sky and exploded into small pieces on Feb. 15, smashing windows, damaging buildings and damaging residents’ eyesight, could have caused much more damage if it had been more solid, three studies published in US journals Nature and Science on Wednesday found.

After studying the area around the explosion and a wealth of video and other evidence over the last few months, NASA scientist Paul Chodas said the meteor blast showed that there were about 20 million space rocks whizzing around the solar system that could do serious damage to Earth – not the 3 million previously thought. That’s because it was considered that meteors had to be 30 meters and wider to cause huge devastation, but Chelyabinsk was actually a nearer miss than it seemed at the time, the scientists said.

Hundreds of videos recorded by car dashboard cameras were analyzed, which helped a great deal to verify the exact trajectory, speed and the energy of the meteor explosion that shattered windows in more than 3,600 apartment blocks, broke in doors and gates, in some cases collapsing roofs and knocking many pedestrians off their feet.

A man in Moscow looks at a computer screen displaying a picture reportedly taken in the Urals city of
Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013, showing the trail of a meteorite above a residential area of the city.
(AFP Photo)

Windows broken as a result of the meteorite fall near Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013.
(Photo courtesy of Nakanune.RU. / RIA Novosti)

Over 1,200 people in the Chelyabinsk region were hospitalized that day because of the nuclear-like explosion.

According to the data now available, the Chelyabinsk meteor was traveling at a speed of 19 kilometers per second (68,400 kilometers an hour), was about a little bit less than 20 meters in diameter and weighed about 13,000 tons. Most of it burned up in the atmosphere and the huge emission of energy at the moment of the explosion, with no more than 0.05 percent (4-6 tons) of the debris of the space object reaching the surface of the planet.

Two groups of scientists published their studies in Nature, one led by Jirí Borovicka, of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the second led by Peter Brown, at the University of Western Ontario. Both calculated that the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion was equivalent to about 500 kilotons of TNT.

It has also been established that it is highly probable that the Chelyabinsk meteor was previously a part of a bigger space rock, two kilometers in diameters – an asteroid identified as (86039) 1999 NC43 that will pass several millions kilometers away from Earth in March 2014.

Destruction caused by the blast of the falling space object at the Chelyabinsk zinc plant on February 15, 2013.
(Pavel Lisitsyn / RIA Novosti)

Brown’s group estimated the peak brightness of the explosion as 30 times brighter than the sun, which led to many, sometimes severe, cases of skin burns and eye retinas being damaged, as an estimated 70 people temporarily lost their sight because of the bright explosion.

The scientists also concluded that the existing models of atmosphere meteor explosions, based on nuclear warhead test data, were not correct, leading scientists to increase the estimated number of space rocks dangerous for Earth flying around the sun.

NASA previously considered meteorites dangerous if they were more than 30 meters in diameter on impact with Earth. After the Chelyabinsk 20-meter meteor exploded with a force of 40 Hiroshima atomic bombs, it became evident that instead of an estimated 3 million potentially dangerous objects in the solar system, scientists should keep tabs on 20 million asteroids.

And while such events were expected to occur only once every 150 years, now 30 years looks more likely to be the frequency of such catastrophes.

The research was based on the work of an international team of 59 researchers from nine countries, led by Olga Popova of the Russian Academy of Sciences. They collected data from multiple sources, including data from a world net of subsonic sonars used by inspectors of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and the US military satellites monitoring missile launches and tests, Gazeta.ru reported.

The scientists calculated the kinetic power of the meteor more accurately at 590 kilotons, nearly twice the power of a W87 American 300-kiloton thermonuclear warhead.

Divers with a meteor fragment retrieved from Lake Chebarkul on October 16, 2013.
(Aleksandr Kondratuk / RIA Novosti)

The group conducted research in the impact zone and modeled of the meteor explosion’s shock wave, which coincided.

The scientists visited 50 villages around Chelyabinsk within weeks after the event, mapping the meteor’s destructive consequences.

They found out that the impact zone spread out as wide as 90 kilometers, resembling a butterfly, making it similar to the impact zone of another famous meteorite explosion, the Tunguska meteor that struck on June 30, 1908 above the Siberian taiga. The Tunguska meteor (a small comet) was up to 150 meters in diameter and the estimated explosion that happened about 10 kilometers above the surface was estimated of up to 30 megatons of TNT equivalent, 100 times more powerful than the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Popova’s group collected answer to over 1,700 questionnaires of eyewitnesses to the Chelyabinsk phenomenon. People said they could see traces of the meteor from as far away as 700 kilometers.
Some of the eyewitnesses questioned by the scientists told them something like, “Huh, I thought Americans were nuking us!”

Popova said the Chelyabinsk meteor was a “standard” LL-type chondrite, with a relatively small quantity of iron in it. But it is still magnetic, and it can be easily detected by a mine detector and rusts when it comes into contact with water, Popova said.

As a rule meteors lose about 90 percent of their mass while they travel through Earth’s atmosphere, but the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk practically disappeared, Popova said. The largest peace of space rock retrieved from Lake Chebarkul in October weighs 570 kilograms, compared to the meteor’s originally estimated 18,000 tons.

“That’s why we still don’t know what destructive forces space bodies are exposed to when they enter the atmosphere,” Olga Popova told Gazeta.ru.

NASA Says That New Chelyabinsk-like Meteor Strike Is SEVEN TIMES More Likely.

Children look at Chelyabinsk meteorite exhibited at Chelyabinsk Museum of Regional Studies.
(Aleksandr Kondratuk / RIA Novosti)

New research out of NASA suggests the odds of the Earth being rocked by another meteorite on par with the one that unexpectedly shook Chelyabinsk, Russia earlier this year are higher than previously estimated.

On Wednesday this week, officials with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced their latest findings regarding February’s meteorite, and it isn’t good news for anyone alarmed that another soaring chunk of rock could come ripping through Earth’s atmosphere.

Scientists say that the Chelyabinsk meteorite was the largest foreign body to hit Earth in almost a century, and similar ones could soon be on the way. Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s meteoroid environment office at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said during a press conference this week that there is a pretty good chance of seeing something similar in the near future.

Divers pull a meteor fragment from Lake Chebarkul. (Aleksandr Kondratuk / RIA Novosti)

"If you look at the number of impacts detected by US government sensors over the past few decades you find the impact rate of kiloton-class objects is greater than would be indicated by the telescopic surveys," Cooke said at the presser, according to the UK’s Register newspaper.

Elsewhere during the event, Cooke acknowledged that the impact rate of these types of meteorites is several-times over what scientists had suspected.

"Over the past few decades we've seen an impact rate about seven times greater than the current state of the telescopic surveys would indicate,” he said.


WATCH:  Meteorite crash in Russia.

Researchers released their findings after spending almost a year investigating the February incident in which a rock nearly 65-feet in diameter soared blew up 18.5 miles above the Earth and then soared over Chelyabinsk after entering the atmosphere at a speed of 43,000 miles-per-hour.

“If you want to calculate what happens in other circumstances in future asteroid impacts, you first need to understand Chelyabinsk,” said Peter Jenniskens, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, according to the Los Angeles Times. “So Chelyabinsk is now the gold standard, thanks to citizen science. It is now our calibration point. And that’s why it’s really important to figure out what happened.”

Damage caused to the Chelyabinsk Zinc Plant by the meteorite fall. (Boris Kaulin / RIA Novosti)

Peter Brown, a planetary scientist at the University of Western Ontario involved in the latest NASA research, added that studying the Chelyabinsk meteorite is making other scientists reconsider how asteroid’s behave.

“We need to refine those estimates,” he said. “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."

Last February’s incident injured more than 1,000 people in Russia and, according to the Washington Post, created a series of explosions equal to about 500 kilotons of TNT. - RT.