The double streak of smoke from the meteorite is probably due to the collision of two meteorite fragments.
The explosion that followed the impact changed the trajectory of the flight of celestial bodies. One of the meteorites fell into Lake Chebarkul, the other landed near Zlatoust. The crash sites are cordoned off, research is underway.
Russian President Vladimir Putin instructed Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov to provide the necessary assistance to people affected by a meteorite in the Urals. At a meeting with the Emergencies Ministry head, Putin noted that everything must be done to objectively assess the damage and immediately help the victims.
In Chelyabinsk, a security system has worked - gas is turned off in houses. Gas has been cut off in hundreds of homes in Chelyabinsk after a meteorite crashed due to a triggered security system, the city administration said on its website on Friday.
Promotional video:
"According to information received from gas supplying organizations, during the shock wave, a security system was triggered, in connection with which gas supply was cut to 17 apartment buildings in the Central District and 437 private houses in different districts of Chelyabinsk (as of 16:00 on February 15)", - says the message.
The United States has programs for observing stellar space, but we do not have continuous monitoring systems yet. Nikolai Zheleznov, a senior researcher at the Institute of Applied Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, located in St. Petersburg, told the BaltInfo correspondent about this.
The astronomer noted that observation stations in Russia sometimes make it possible to predict the approach of celestial bodies to the Earth, as was the case, for example, in 2008 with a meteorite that fell in Sudan. However, there is insufficient monitoring, so scientists can track far from all celestial bodies. The specialist emphasized that there are objective reasons for this - for example, meteors may be too small to be detected.
Nikolai Zheleznov noted that, in particular, the United States has large programs for monitoring stellar space, they cover the entire territory of the planet and allow tracking, among other things, small meteors and asteroids, as well as spent rocket stages. “We have few observation stations in our country, but there are no such programs,” the scientist noted.
Meanwhile, their importance can hardly be overestimated not only in connection with the possibility of preventing destruction, which caused, in particular, a meteorite that exploded over the Chelyabinsk region, but also because we need to protect our satellites and space stations from space debris, concluded Nikolai Zheleznov.
The Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region Mikhail Yurevich urgently returned to the region to eliminate the consequences. In his LJ blog, he also writes about the absence of major damage and notes that the main task is to keep warm in buildings with broken windows and prevent the heating system from defrosting. In general, he calls the situation controllable. It is also noted that the radiation background in the city does not exceed the norm.
Meanwhile, window sellers in Chelyabinsk are experiencing a boom in orders. “Compared to ordinary days, the number of orders has increased 50 times at least. We have already received calls from the city administration and from social institutions,”said Dmitry Churov, manager of the official representative office of the Steklandia factory, noting that they were unable to cope with incoming orders.
The number of customer requests to the Eurookno service department has grown many times over. According to the spokesman, the phone rings every five minutes, and at the current rate, it will be impossible to fix all the windows in two days.
Based on media materials