A meteorite that fell in the Chelyabinsk region in 2013 helped calculate how much meteoroids lose their weight when entering the atmosphere, and it also turned out that before the fall it was the size of a six-story building, said on Tuesday the geologist, author of the book "Meteorites of Russia" Sergei Kolisnichenko.
The meteorite fell into Lake Chebarkul on February 15, 2013, and residents of the Chelyabinsk region and surrounding regions witnessed its passage in the sky in the form of a fiery flash.
“The Chelyabinsk meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere at an angle of 18 degrees. A six-story building flies in, on the way, 100 kilometers from the ground, seven thousand tons disappear into dust, two tons arrive. What happened? It was calculated for the first time that a meteorite loses up to 200 tons of its matter per second of flight in the atmosphere with such a trajectory. If he had fallen two, say, seconds earlier, he would have had a completely different weight, said Kolisnichenko at a press conference in Chelyabinsk.
He explained that this figure had never been obtained from other meteorites, because scientists did not know how much matter enters the atmosphere.
As Sergei Zamozdra, Associate Professor of the Department of Theoretical Physics of Chelyabinsk State University, said at a press conference, initially the meteoroid was about the size of a six-story building, at altitudes below 45 kilometers the meteoroid began to split into fragments, and each fragment into even smaller fragments, the field of dispersion of fragments as a result stretched for 80 kilometers.
According to him, for the first time a large amount of observational material was presented to scientists for research, including video recorders, information from Earth satellites, eyewitness accounts, and, most importantly, a fragment of a meteorite found in the lake.