Something extra interesting about this is the number of videos that recorded it due to the prevalence of car dash cams. This helped scientists quickly reconstruct what happened and is amazing footage to have of such a rare event.
Speaking of, what is it with the Russians and the dash cams? There seems to be a subculture of recording while driving and posting videos of road rage, fistfights, etc.
Apparently there was/is a scam where people would walk in front of your car and then sue you for hitting them. So everybody started putting in dash cams to be able to provide evidence against the scammers.
Insurance purposes. Russia is a strange country. It wouldn't be too uncommon to have a drunk Russian jumping onto your car angrily while you're parked at a stop-light, or someone knocking you off the road on a highway.
I once saw a small meteor falling, sometime in the early 2000s. I had no idea what it was, just a giant bright sparkling object in the sky...it was kind of terrifying.
For days I looked for any information in the news about it and never found anything reported. I never quite knew what it was, and nobody else really believed by description, until all the dashcam videos about this incident showed up on the internet.
I once saw something during bright, sunny summer day - it looked like a small object that hit the atmosphere pretty much head on (as in it's velocity was perpendicular to the surface). It lasted a second or two, looked like a turbolaser shot or something
Yeah, I saw that. Looks like the shockwaves were the primary mode of injury, though I guess that will always be the primary mode of injury in a large explosion. No deaths that I could see, which is good. I remember seeing the dashcams back then
> Looks like the shockwaves were the primary mode of injury
Not the shockwaves, but things damaged/knocked over by the waves. If you were standing in a field, the shockwave would do nothing to you. It was harmless. But if you are standing beside a poorly-designed glass building, pieces are going to fall off that building. This was Russia. I would expect that other countries, with different building practices, might suffer far fewer casualties.
No, but most anti-earthquake measures, especially in regard to glass falling from buildings, would seem applicable. So too with codes meant for safety during hurricanes, tornadoes and other strong winds.
Well, Canada is pretty big too, but we don't get any asteroid action. Canada is like "oops, sorry, didn't see you coming. Let me rotate out of your way" and then Russia gets hit.
Meteoroids and asteroids generally come from well-known directions since the asteroid belt is relatively confined within the plane of the solar system, with inclinations less than 30 degrees on average. But due to the Oort cloud being spherical, comets can come at us from nearly any direction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
Something extra interesting about this is the number of videos that recorded it due to the prevalence of car dash cams. This helped scientists quickly reconstruct what happened and is amazing footage to have of such a rare event.