• Another asteroid similar to Russian meteor zooming past us harmlessly

    Virtual Telescope

    A newly found asteroid, 2013 EC, can be seen in the lower left corner of the red box in this image.

    By Nancy Atkinson
    Universe Today

    A newly found asteroid will pass by Earth at about the distance of the moon's orbit, with its closest approach coming at 2:35 a.m. ET (7:35 a.m. UTC) Monday.

    Named 2013 EC, the asteroid is roughly the size of the space rock that exploded over Russia two and a half weeks ago, measuring somewhere between 10 and 17 meters (33 to 55 feet) wide. The asteroid that sparked the Russian meteor is estimated to have been about 17 meters wide when it entered Earth’s atmosphere.

    2013 EC was discovered by the Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona on Saturday. There is no chance this asteroid will hit Earth.

    The asteroid is due to come within 246,000 miles (396,000 kilometers) from Earth. In comparison, the moon's distance from Earth varies between 225,622 and 252,088 miles (363,104 to 406,696 kilometers).

    Gianluca Masi from the Virtual Telescope Project had a live view of the asteroid when it was about twice the distance of the moon, and a replay of that webcast is available below. (The event starts at about the 38-minute mark in the YouTube video.)

    "That we are finding all these asteroids recently does not mean that we are being visited by more asteroids," Masi said during the webcast, “just that our ability to detect them has gotten so much better. Our technology has improved a lot over the past decades."

    Gianluca Masi from the Virtual Telescope Project discusses the asteroid 2013 EC during a Google+ Hangout. The commentary begins at about the 38-minute mark in this raw video.

    More about asteroids:

    More info about 2013 EC on the JPL Small Body Database.

    This report was originally published on Universe Today as "Newly Found Asteroid to Pass Within Moon’s Orbit on March 4, 2013." Copyright 2013 Universe Today. Reprinted with permission.

  • Meteor lurked for thousands of years before blasting Russia, experts say

    Don Davis

    Artwork by Don Davis shows a meteor streaking over Chelyabinsk. More of Davis' art is on his website.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Now that they've worked out the orbital path of the meteor that blew up over Russia last month, scientists are saying that the asteroid behind the blast crossed Earth's orbit regularly for thousands of years. Two weeks ago, it looked as if the 1.1 million residents of the city of Chelyabinsk had been hit by a cosmic stroke of bad luck — but now they're talking about turning the most powerful asteroid impact in more than a century into a tourist attraction.

    The Feb. 15 aerial explosion and the shock wave it set off caused an estimated $33 million in property damage, much of it in the form of shattered windows and weakened walls. It also injured about 1,200 people, with most of them hurt by the flying glass from those windows. Authorities started the cleanup work almost immediately, while researchers rushed to figure out the scale of the explosion.

    Based on the readings from infrasound sensors stationed all over the world to monitor nuclear-weapons tests, NASA said the energy release was equivalent to 500 kilotons of TNT, or roughly 30 times the energy released by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. That translated into an object about 17 meters (55 feet wide), weighing 10,000 tons. The space agency said it was the biggest cosmic impact recognized since the 1908 Tunguska asteroid blast that leveled millions of trees in Siberia.

    Less than a week after the blast, Colombian astronomers worked out a rough orbital path for the Chelyabinsk asteroid, based on an analysis of the videos captured by dashboard cameras and traffic cams in the area. On Friday, NASA produced a more definitive orbital track, based not only on the videos but also on the readings from the federal government's space sensors. The report took advantage of a recently signed agreement with the Air Force Space Command for the public release of previously hush-hush data.

    Sizing up a superbolide
    Friday's assessment is the first entry in a new NASA database for fireballs and bolide reports, which classifies the Chelyabinsk meteor as a "superbolide."

    The latest readings confirm the conclusion that the object's orbit ranged from the main asteroid belt, beyond the orbit of Mars, to well within Earth's orbit. They also show that the Chelyabinsk asteroid's approach couldn't have been detected by ground-based optical telescopes because the space rock was hidden in the sun's glare.

    P. Chodas et al. / NASA / JPL-Caltech

    An orbital diagram shows the pre-impact orbit of the asteroid that blew up over Russia on Feb. 15, based on the track of its atmospheric entry. The asteroid came at Earth from the sunward side.

    "The impactor had likely been following this orbit for many thousands of years, crossing the Earth's orbit every time on its outbound leg," NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office said in Friday's assessment.

    The fresh readings tweaked previous estimates of the object's size and brightness as well: NASA said the meteor was 17 to 20 meters wide (55 to 65 feet wide), and reached peak brightness at an altitude of 14.5 miles (23.3 kilometers), when it was traveling at a speed of 41,760 mph (18.6 kilometers per second). There's also quite a bit of discussion about the energy release — and why the new estimate for impact energy (440 kilotons, which includes energy lost during atmospheric entry) is so much bigger than the fireball's radiated energy (90 kilotons, which applies only to the blast).

    From the get-go, astronomers have said that the Russian meteor was not connected with the close flyby of a much bigger asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, which took place later on the same day. Friday's assessment confirms that lack of a connection — not only because the two orbital paths were markedly different, but also because the two asteroids had different compositions.

    NASA said a spectral analysis of 2012 DA14, conducted by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests that the asteroid is a relatively rare carbonaceous chondrite "with abundant calcium- and aluminum-rich inclusions."

    "On the other hand, meteorite fragments being recovered from the fireball event are reported as silicate-rich ordinary chondrites, a completely different and unrelated class of meteorites," NASA said. "About 80 percent of all meteorite falls are in the ordinary chondrite category." 

    Andrei Romanov / Reuters

    A local resident shows a fragment thought to be part of a meteorite collected in a snow-covered field in the Yetkulski region, outside the city of Chelyabinsk.

    Taking pride in a superbolide
    Scientists may classify the Russian meteorites as an unremarkable kind of space rock, but they're extra-special to the folks in Chelyabinsk. For one thing, such meteorites could be worth more than their weight in gold on the collectors' market. Some have estimated their value at $2,200 per gram. For another thing, the region's residents are now talking about capitalizing on the international interest generated by the impact.

    "Space sent us a gift, and we need to make use of it," Natalia Gritsay, head of the region’s tourism department, told Bloomberg News this week. "We need our own Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty."

    Among the ideas being debated: building a "Meteor Disneyland" theme park that re-creates the glass-shattering event, or organizing a cosmic music and fireworks festival, or erecting a beacon-tipped pyramid at nearby Chebarkul Lake, where meteorite fragments have been found. Tourist companies are already starting to sell group tours to Chelyabinsk at $800 a person, Bloomberg News reported.

    When the meteor exploded, many of the region's residents feared that it was a plane crash, or a missile strike, or even the end of the world. Now it's starting to look as if the superbolide is the best thing to hit Chelyabinsk in years.

    “Nobody had heard about us, and now all the world knows,” the region's governor, Mikhail Yurevich, told Bloomberg News. “We can earn some dividends on that."

    Slideshow: Meteor streaks over Siberia

    Yekaterina Pustynnikova / Chelyabinsk.ru via AP

    Click through scenes from Russia's Chelyabinsk region, where a huge meteor fireball set off alarms, injured hundreds of people and caused a factory roof to collapse.

    Launch slideshow

    More about the meteor:

    Tip o' the Log to space illustrator Don Davis and Spike MacPhee.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • After studying Russian meteor blast, experts get set for the next asteroid

    The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd takes a "deep dive" look into the meteor that hit Russia and why NASA did not have earlier notice of its coming. Rep. Rush Holt explains NASA's tracking system and discusses budget cuts to NASA and the department's future.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    The meteor that blew up over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk 11 days ago has provided a new focus for the effort to establish an international asteroid warning system, one of NASA's top experts on the issue says.

    Lindley Johnson, the executive for the Near Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said that the Feb. 15 impact is certain to become "by far the best-documented meteor and meteorite in history" — but at the time, he and his colleagues could hardly believe it was happening.

    "Our first reaction was, 'This can't be. ... This must be some test of a missile that's gone awry,'" Johnson told NBC News.

    The Chelyabinsk meteor exploded at an estimated altitude of 12 miles (20 kilometers) over the city of 1.1 million in Russia's Urals Mountains, setting off a shock wave that blew out windows, caused an estimated $33 million in property damage and injured more than 1,200 people.

    It was doubly coincidental for Johnson and his colleagues: The meteor was thought to have been caused by the breakup of a 17-meter-wide (55-foot-wide), 10,000-ton asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere and released the equivalent of 500 kilotons of TNT in explosive energy. All this happened just hours before a 45-meter-wide (150-foot-wide) asteroid, capable of setting off a city-killing blast, passed within 17,200 miles (27,680 kilometers) of our planet. Adding to that coincidence, researchers from around the world were gathered in Vienna for talks aimed at moving forward with an international network to deal with ... asteroid threats!

    The spectacle in Russia "certainly brought renewed interest to our efforts here," said Johnson, a leader of NASA's delegation to the Vienna talks.

    He said the recommendations from the researchers were "well-received" and are moving up the ladder to the next phase in a U.N.-led process for addressing outer-space threats. An action plan could be considered by the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space during its next meeting in Vienna in June.

    Johnson summarized the three main points of the recommendations:

    • Set up an international asteroid warning network, or IAWN, supported with existing detection assets but incorporating additional contributions. "The basis of such a network already exists," Johnson said, thanks to NASA, the European Space Agency, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center and the NEODyS asteroid-tracking center at the University of Pisa in Italy. NASA also has partnered with the U.S. Air Force to share tracking data about near-Earth objects. Just this week, a $25 million Canadian-built satellite known as NEOSSat was launched to look for small asteroids in Earth-threatening orbits.
    • Bring the world's space agencies together in a new working group called the Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group — also known as SMPAG (pronounced like "Same Page"). The group's purpose, Johnson said, would be to "get all the agencies on the 'same page' as far as assessing what capabilities could be brought to bear should there be a threatening asteroid detected."
    • Put asteroid experts in contact with countries around the world, to advise disaster response agencies about the nature of a potential impact event — that is, the area expected to be affected, the potential effects and the scale of the evacuation if necessary. "It's an offshoot of the warning network," Johnson said. If the asteroid behind the Russian meteor had been detected in advance, for example, the expert network might have advised emergency workers about the potential for a midair blast and the resulting shock wave (although Johnson said he was "surprised" by the shock wave's effect).

    Until last year, NASA spent about $4 million a year to track near-Earth objects, or NEOs, and Johnson said the program "has accomplished quite a bit in the relatively short time that it's been in existence." About 95 percent of the potentially threatening asteroids bigger than a kilometer (half-mile) wide have been detected. However, now NASA is working on charting the asteroids down to a width of 100 meters (330 feet). To fund that more difficult task, the annual funding level for NEO research was raised to $20 million a year.

    NASA is using that money to beef up its capabilities for spotting smaller asteroids, through programs such as the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, which is due to get $5 million over the next five years. Less than a million dollars a year is going toward studies aimed at figuring out what to do if a threatening asteroid is found, Johnson said. After all, you have to identify the risky rocks before you can do anything about them. The potential strategies range from diverting it gently with the aid of gravity tractors or space paintball guns, to blasting it with nukes, Bruce Willis-style.

    "It really depends on the scenario that we'd be faced with," Johnson said. "It depends on how big the object is. It depends on how long we have to do something about it. And if we do the search-and-detection job right, we will find a potential hazard many years if not decades before it becomes an immediate threat. There may be technologies available at that time that we never thought about. I don't get too worked up about trying to find an immediate technology that we've got to have right now to do that. Our focus is to find them as early as we can, and have the maximum amount of time to do something about it."

    Update for 7:30 p.m. ET Feb. 26: Looking for a practical tip? The large majority of the people injured by the meteor blast were hurt by flying glass, which led Johnson to give this advice during a Vienna news conference: "When you see a white flash and a large trail in the sky, it's probably not a good time to stand at the window and look at it, because it may be a blast coming."

    Update for 8:15 p.m. ET Feb. 26: As reported in Technology Review's Physics arXiv Blog, Colombian researchers used video from dashboard cameras and other sources to reconstruct the orbital path of the Russian meteor — and they classified it as an Apollo asteroid, a type of space rock whose path crosses Earth's orbit. That's consistent with NASA's analysis, which said the asteroid traced an orbit that ranged between the main asteroid belt and the region of outer space inside Earth's orbit.

    "The preliminary orbit indicates it takes about 2.1 years to go around the sun once ... so this thing was out at its farthest distance from the sun roughly a year ago," Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, told reporters during a Feb. 15 teleconference.

    The space rock was on its way back out toward the main asteroid belt, coming from Earth's sunward side, when it entered the atmosphere and blew up. That's why it wasn't possible to predict the impact in advance: At a width of 55 feet, the object was too small to show up in traditional sky surveys, and it would have been lost in the sun's glare during its final approach.

    So far, searchers have recovered just bits and pieces of the shattered space boulder. "The largest I've heard is a kilogram and a half," or about three pounds, Johnson told NBC News. 

    NASA budgeted $20 million dollars last year to look for objects that may hit the earth, but some scientists say more money should be spent on detection and ways to avoid a possible collision. NBC's Michelle Franzen reports.

    Slideshow: Meteor streaks over Siberia

    Yekaterina Pustynnikova / Chelyabinsk.ru via AP

    Click through scenes from Russia's Chelyabinsk region, where a huge meteor fireball set off alarms, injured hundreds of people and caused a factory roof to collapse.

    Launch slideshow

    More about asteroids:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    This story was originally published on Tue Feb 26, 2013 6:23 PM EST

  • Russian meteor spurs call to share military satellite data

    Russian Emergency Ministry

    What appears to be a meteor trail over eastern Russian is seen in this image released Friday by the Russian Emergency Ministry. The meteor fall included a massive blast.

    By Leonard David
    Space.com

    Piecing together the true nature of the meteor that detonated over Russia would benefit by observations likely gleaned by U.S. military spacecraft.

    But for several years, that data has been stamped classified and not made available to the scientific community that studies near-Earth objects (NEOs) and any potential hazard to Earth from these celestial interlopers.

    In the wake of the Russian meteor explosion, there is a renewed call to make data gathered by both space systems and ground networks speedily available to scientists.

    Incoming meteoroids
    "The satellites that monitor the skies around the world for missile launches also detect brilliant incoming meteoroids, including startling events much smaller than the Chelyabinsk bolide," said asteroid expert Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

    This type of information is extremely valuable for helping scientists understand the potentially dangerous cosmic environment of planet Earth, Chapman told Space.com. [See video of the Russian meteor explosion]

    EUMETSAT

    The meteor that exploded over the Urals of central Russia on Friday was seen by Meteosat-9, at the edge of the satellite view.

    "In the past, these data have been partly withheld from the scientific community. They should be released immediately, while scientists, emergency management officials, and others are trying to understand what has happened, where people might have been hurt, and where valuable meteorites might be found," Chapman emphasized.

    More than 1,000 people were injured and thousands of buildings were damaged during Friday's meteor blast over the city of Chelyabinsk near the Ural Mountains. The explosion was caused by an airburst of a 55-foot (17 meters) space rock that weighed 10,000 tons and detonated in the atmosphere while traveling at about 40,000 miles per hour (64,373 km/h).

    Data sharing
    The Russian fireball detonation was "Mother Nature at her surprising best!" That's the view of Apollo astronaut Russell Schweickart, Chair Emeritus of the B612 Foundation of Mountain View, Calif.

    Russia Today

    This video screenshot shows the fireball from the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Friday, creating a shockwave that shattered windows and injured more than 1,000 people.

    B612 is a group dedicated to harnessing the power of science and technology to protect the future of planet Earth while extending humankind's reach into the solar system.

    Schweickart also calls attention to the value of military satellite data to better assess the Russian meteor and other space rock events that pierce the Earth’s atmosphere.

    "There's no question that data sharing here is critical," Schweickart said.

    "We need to learn as much as possible from these incidents, and without jeopardizing any legitimate national security consideration, what they have should openly be shared with the rest of us," he told Space.com. [See more photos of the Russian meteor blast]

    Meteor airburst events
    The call for release of military fireball data was flagged in a 2010 National Research Council report, "Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies."

    A blue-ribbon committee of experts found that "U.S. Department of Defense satellites have detected and continue to detect high-altitude airburst events from NEOs entering Earth’s atmosphere. Such data are valuable to the NEO community for assessing NEO hazards."

    Furthermore, the NRC study group recommended: "Data from NEO airburst events observed by the U.S. Department of Defense satellites should be made available to the scientific community to allow it to improve understanding of the NEO hazards to Earth."

    The report went on to note that airbursts are also detected by the arrays of microbarographic sensors deployed by the DoD and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) Organization.

    This international network — called the International Monitoring System — consists of seismic, infrasound, radionuclide and hydroacoustic stations. However, the data are not publicly available and the scientific community would benefit from unfiltered access to the data produced by these arrays, the report said.

    Untapped wealth of potential
    In an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) symposium held Feb. 17 during the organization's annual meeting in Boston, experts took part in a session titled "Unreasonable Usefulness of Test-Ban Verification for Disaster Warning and Science."

    According to the AAAS, the multidisciplinary verification regime of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, developed over five decades ago, today consists of seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound, radionuclide and onsite inspection technologies that have matured into the world's most sophisticated multilateral monitoring network.

    The network consisting of 337 facilities around the globe — of which 85 percent are already in operation — is sending around 10 gigabytes of data daily in near real time.

    These data are available to all 183 CTBT member states. However, according to the AAAS, science is only beginning to discover the value of this $1 billion system for uses beyond the detection of nuclear tests. The data are an untapped wealth of potential.

    Possible uses include the monitoring and studying of meteors entering the atmosphere, climate change, as well as volcanic eruptions, even whale singing/migrating and icebergs calving.

    Interesting insight
    Because of its intense power, the Russian meteor explosion was detected by seismometers around the Ural region, including those that are part of the Global Seismographic Network, said AAAS symposium participant Miaki Ishii, associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences within Harvard University’s Seismology Group in Cambridge, Mass.

    "For example, stations at Arti, Russia and Borovoye, Kazakhstan show a few millimeters of ground displacement," Ishii told Space.com.

    "I'm sure careful analysis of these data will provide interesting insight into the event. There are classified data that would certainly be useful in scientific studies, especially from regions where we have limited amount of data," Ishii said.

    Monitoring our planet: all the time
    Adding his voice to data sharing and the Russian meteor event is Raymond Jeanloz, professor of astronomy and Earth and planetary science at the University of California at Berkeley, also a participant in the AAAS symposium.

    "Yes, I think this is an excellent example of how useful it is to have multiple sensors monitoring our planet everywhere, all the time, including the infrasound and seismic components of the CTBTO's International Monitoring System, as well as satellites and telescopes," Jeanloz said.

    "Further analysis is needed, but it looks like this was an event with about 100-200 kiloton explosive yield, a rough estimate that needs confirming and refining," Jeanloz said, "meaning that it happens on time periods of decades to perhaps a century or so."

    In fact, NASA's most recent estimate has pegged the Russian meteor blast as the equivalent of a 500-kiloton explosion.

    Meteor network science
    Jeanloz said that there are possibilities of enough advance warning being feasible to identify location and time of impact for future meteor events, perhaps with enough accuracy for useful evacuation. Networking more sensors and infrastructure would be needed, he said, but this would be using current technology. 

    Regarding last week's Russian bolide, Jeanloz told Space.com, it is of interest as a hazard to be mitigated, and also in terms of basic science. These objects coming in from space, he said, "represent the last few crumbs of materials" that built our planet.

    "We're still in the tail end of Earth's formation 4.5 billion years after the main event! We are only recently learning about the statistics of such bolides — how frequently they intersect Earth, as a function of size and therefore explosive power on impacting Earth's surface or atmosphere — because it is only in recent years that we have good global coverage of such events," Jeanloz concluded.

    Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for Space.com since 1999. Follow Space.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook  and  Google+.

    Copyright 2013 Space.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

  • Russian 'meteorite rush' targets rocks valued more highly than gold

    The so-called "meteorite rush" has begun around the city of Chelyabinsk, where people have been searching in the snow and ice for chunks of the meteor that hit Russia last week. NBC's Stephanie Gosk reports.

    By Alissa de Carbonnel, Reuters

    MOSCOW — A meteor that exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains and sent fireballs blazing to Earth has set off a rush to find fragments of the space rock which hunters hope could fetch thousands of dollars apiece.

    Friday's blast and the shock wave that followed shattered windows, injured almost 1,200 people and caused about $33 million worth of damage, said local authorities.

    It also started a "meteorite rush" around the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, 950 miles (1,500 kilometers) east of Moscow, where groups of people have started combing through the snow and ice. One amateur space enthusiast estimated that chunks could be worth anything up to 66,000 rubles ($2,200) per gram — more than 40 times the current cost of gold.

    "The price is hard to say yet . ... The fewer meteorites that are recovered, the higher their price," said Dmitry Kachkalin, a member of the Russian Society of Amateur Meteorite Lovers. Meteorites are parts of a meteor that have fallen to Earth.

    Scientists at the Urals Federal University were the first to announce a significant find: 53 small, stony, black objects around Lake Chebarkul, near Chelyabinsk, which tests confirmed were small meteorites. The fragments were only 0.5 to 1 centimeter (0.2 to 0.4 inches) across, but the scientists said larger pieces may have crashed into the lake, where a crater in the ice about 8 meters (26 feet) wide opened up after Friday's explosion.

    "We just completed tests, and confirm that the pieces of matter found by our experts around Lake Chebarkul are really meteorites," Viktor Grokhovsky, a scientist with the Urals Federal University and the Russian Academy of Sciences, told the RIA news agency. "These are classified as ordinary chondrites, or stony meteorites, with an iron content of about 10 percent."

    He did not say whether the fragments had told his team anything about the origins of the meteor, which NASA estimated was 55 feet (17 meters) across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.

    Alexander Khlopotov / Urals Federal University Press Service via AP

    A researcher examines pieces of a meteorite in a laboratory on Monday in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

    Alexander Khlopotov / Urals Federal University Press Service via AP

    Pieces of a meteorite are seen in a Russian laboratory on Monday. Fifty-three pieces have been brought for analysis to the Urals Federal University in Yekaterinburg. The largest one is one centimeter (a half-inch) in diameter, the smallest is about one millimeter.

    The main fireball streaked across the sky at a speed of about 30 kilometers (19 miles) per second before crashing into the snowy wastes, according to Roscosmos, Russia's space agency.

    More than 20,000 people took part in search and cleanup operations over the weekend in and around Chelyabinsk, which is in the heart of a region packed with industrial military plants. Many other people were in the area just hoping to find a meteorite, after what was described by scientists as a once-in-a-century event.

    Residents of a village near Chelyabinsk searched the snowy streets, collecting stones they hoped would prove to be the real thing. But not all were ready to sell.

    "I will keep it. Why sell it? I didn't have a rich lifestyle before, so why start now?" a woman in a pink woolen hat and winter jacket told state television Rossiya-24 as she clutched a small black pebble.

    The Internet filled quickly with advertisements from eager hunters hoping to sell what they said were meteorites — some for as little as 1,000 rubles ($33.18).

    The authenticity of the items was hard to ascertain. One seller of a large, silver-hued rock wrote in an advertisement on the portal Avito.ru: "Selling an unusual rock. It may be a piece of meteorite, it may be a bit of a UFO, it may be a piece of a rocket!"

    Slideshow: Meteor streaks over Siberia

    Yekaterina Pustynnikova / Chelyabinsk.ru via AP

    Click through scenes from Russia's Chelyabinsk region, where a huge meteor fireball set off alarms, injured hundreds of people and caused a factory roof to collapse.

    Launch slideshow

    More about the Russian meteor:

    Reuters' Ludmila Danilova and Gabriela Baczinska contributed to this report.

  • Satellite watches from space as meteor explodes

    EUMETSAT

    IR3.9 image of the thermal impact of the Russia meteor taken by Meteosat-9 satellite on Friday.

    By Space.com Staff

    The meteor that exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains early Friday morning was spotted from space by a weather satellite as the space rock streaked through the atmosphere and exploded.

    The photos were captured by the satellite Meteosat-9 as the meteor entered Earth's atmosphere , causing a sonic boom and injuring hundreds in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) east of Moscow.

    A joint venture of the European Space Agency and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, Meteosat-9 was launched in 2005 to keep watch on Earth's weather from space. The satellite also took video of the fireball.

    Residents aboard the International Space Station weren't able to see the meteor explosion from the station's vantage point.

    "We weren't in a position to be able to see that meteor do all that damage in Russia," Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield said earlier Friday during a question-and-answer session held by the University of Waterloo in Canada. 

    According to NASA experts, the meteor was brighter than the sun when it fell into the atmosphere, and remained visible for about 30 seconds.

    The meteor explosion is not related to Friday's close flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14  , NASA scientists say.  

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