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Russian meteor hit with force of 30 Hiroshima bombs
The meteor that streaked across the skies over Russia in a blinding fireball on Friday exploded with a force about 30 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, NASA scientists have said.

The 55-foot rock, said by Nasa to have a mass of 10,000 tonnes, plunged to Earth in the Urals region on Friday morning, causing shockwaves that injured 1,200 people and damaged thousands of homes in an event unprecedented in modern times.
In recent decades, at any rate. The Tunguska meteor was in 1908, which counts as modern times, even if they were Edwardian.
Nasa estimated that the energy released by the meteor's impact with the atmosphere was 500 kilotonnes, around 30 times the force of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. It entered the atmosphere and broke up at an altitude of around 32 miles, causing a shockwave that blew out windows and set of car alarms in Chelyabinsk two and a half minutes later.

Divers were this morning searching the Chelyabinsk region's frozen Lake Chebarkul for a fragment of the meteorite. No fragments have been found in the region so far - despite some 20,000 rescuers and recovery workers being dispatched to help the hundreds of people injured.

An army of glaziers were also being transported to Chelyabinsk to urgently repair the thousands of broken windows in homes as night time temperatures fall below -15C.

Scientists from Nasa, the US space agency, estimated that the amount of energy released from impact with the atmosphere was about 30 times greater than the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II.
Posted by: tipper 2013-02-16
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=362444