12 hours past the russian meteor
It’s been a good 12 hours since the world has seen the nearest near-miss since Tunguska in 1908. A very large meteor on the order of 15 metres and maybe 10 tonnes passed over the central Ural Mountains in Russia, north of Kazikstan. How much survived reentry and actual landing sites are still unverified.
Coincidentally asteroid 2012 DA14 passed nearby this afternoon. It is much bigger than the Russian meteor and if it were following the same orbital path, the effects would be magnitudes of order larger.
There are news sources, images and stories all across the net so I won’t bother to repeat them.
The upshot of this is why we run allsky cameras and attempt to image large meteors… the brighter they are the larger they are, the larger they are the better odds of some surviving reentry. We have a good chance at sample recovery if they do land, with more and better cameras imaging their trajectory.
Learning more about the rocks up there helps calculate actual odd of risk. In the end it comes down to this, found on google.
