Meteorite fireball slams into Russia, 1,000 hurt

A flaming meteorite streaked across the sky and slammed into central Russia on Friday with a massive boom that blew out windows and damaged thousands of buildings around the city of Chelyabinsk, resulting in injury of more than 1,000 people in the area, officials said.

The rare and spectacular phenomenon sparked confusion and panic among residents of the region and was captured by numerous witnesses on video that quickly spread to television and computer screens around the world.

"Suddenly, it was very, very horribly bright,” a local teacher in the Chelyabinsk region told RIA Novosti. “Not like the lights got turned on, but as if everything was illuminated with unusual white light."

Police and other officials said around 1,200 people had been hurt, including more than 200 children, mostly in the Chelyabinsk Region near the Ural Mountains. By the end of the day, the number hospitalized was 50, according to the Emergencies Ministry. Earlier, at least two people were reported to be in "grave" condition.
The majority of those hurt had suffered cuts from broken glass, but the region's governor said two-thirds of the injuries were very light.

The blast was so powerful that it was detected by 11 of the 45 infrasound stations of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO)’s network designed to track atomic blasts across the planet.

Bill Cooke, lead for the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, said at a teleconference on Saturday (Moscow time) the object that exploded above Chelyabinsk was, in fact, a “tiny asteroid” measuring about 15 meters in diameter and weighting 7,000 metric tons.

The European Space Agency (ESA) said there was no link between the meteorite and the 2012 DA14 asteroid which is due to pass close by the Earth later on Friday. NASA also said there was no connection because the asteriod and the "Russian meteorite" are on "very different paths."

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at an economic forum going on in Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region, called the meteorite “a symbol of the forum.”

“I hope that there will be no serious consequences, but it is a demonstration that it is not only the economy that is vulnerable, but our planet as well,” he said.