For the sake of order, the ancient Chebarkul stuttered, but did not become greedy - it gave out from the bottom a large fragment of a space body that so unexpectedly made the South Urals famous.
Interest in the topic of "alien" received an additional impetus. Scientists' comments rained down again, returning us to those February days when broken glass and world fame fell on the shocked Chelyabinsk. In this regard, the Vecherka correspondent met with one of the eyewitnesses of the “guest's” visit, Vyacheslav Bakin.
This is his photograph of the meteorite trail first published by the "Rossiyskaya Gazeta". And even though colleagues in a hurry put a different name, Vyacheslav Konstantinovich is not offended.
“Little things,” he says, “but the lies of the“academicians”already enrage me! Stop lying to us about the meteorite! About the fact that he flew from Kazakhstan, that he fell. It's ridiculous that NASA determined the body to be only 16 meters.
Vyacheslav Bakin's desk is littered with newspaper clippings today. Apparently, Vyacheslav Konstantinovich intently, painstakingly maintains the "meteorite" dossier. His particular partiality is not out of the blue. First, astronomy is his love, which has not let go from his youth. All his life he has been looking into the starry sky with a telescope and a telescope.
Secondly, Bakin is from that famous cohort of photographers who came out of the legendary Chelyabinsk photo club. This means that the complex relationship between optics and reality is known to him firsthand. And finally, third, he is a meticulous techie who is lucky to be an eyewitness to a cosmic event. As they say, it’s already agreed.
Promotional video:
A miracle happened
I peer at a large panoramic shot that needs to be unwrapped like a scroll. The date and time are marked on it by the hand of the author: 2013-15-02, 9 hours 23 minutes 23 seconds.
“This is a view from the ministerial window in the first seconds,” Bakin explains, walking around the office. - I clicked, began to rearrange the camera to make a video, and then a shock wave came. Everybody heard the clap like an explosion. Apparently, the object overcame a speed of 1200 kilometers per hour somewhere at a distance of 50 kilometers, and the shock wave came here in two and a half seconds.
The flash impression was strong. My light bulbs were on - they dimmed when suddenly a glow began in the sky. I run to the window and see the flight of a bright body, heading exactly to the west. Sergei Sikharulidze also saw the last stage of the flight of the body, which melted, like in a science fiction film. Well, of course, the speed is great. It all took a third of a second.
Let us return once again to the facts that Bakin collected and which the most responsible commentators adhere to. A cosmic body, according to Bakin, up to 300 meters in diameter, flew to the Earth from the direction of the Sun. And this weighty "cobblestone" at great speed struck the atmosphere, forming a shock wave that reached our city in 2 minutes 40 seconds.
This was recorded by ministerial registrars. The incandescent body rushed from the north-east to the south-west and jumped back into open space, decently burnt and losing part of its mass. Therefore, all the talk about the "meteorite fell" should not be taken seriously. If this thing fell, we would not have gotten off with broken glasses and bursting membranes in our ears. And it is really a miracle that the "guest" has mastered the earthly attraction and broke free.
Is it not a miracle that a fleeting encounter with a merciless space "alien" was without casualties? A neat hole in the glass, two and a half millimeters thick, made by one of the millions of fragments, makes you think about it. Look at the photo taken by Vyacheslav Bakin at the Department of Architecture. The window stood for a long time "shot through".
There is a version that there are millions of such holes on the roofs of Chelyabinsk. So, making calculations with all known data, Bakin came to the conclusion that a body with a volume of four million cubic meters and a mass of up to nine million tons flew into space. Where did the "alien" go, whose debris has already gone to scientists, while the question. But what if it returns with a "correction" of its orbit? Astronomers are still silent, mistakenly believing that "a meteorite flopped into Chebarkul." However, this is only a splinter. And, according to eyewitnesses, the same large fragments as the Chebarkul one should be looked for near Selezyan, where residents saw at least three, scattered in different directions.
And teased us with a red tail
By the way, what is the correct name for the space "guest"? Since we stopped studying astronomy at school, our dense consciousness has finally become entangled in all these "asteroids" and "fireballs".
- When an object flies outside the Earth, it is an asteroid (like a star) or a fireball that is invisible from the ground, explains Bakin. - When a fireball enters our atmosphere, it automatically turns into a meteoroid. During these February days, I drove towards Selezyan. And there I was just puzzled by the sight of a flat snow field. On a huge space, someone unknown threw identical lumps of snow. He stopped, began to pick them - but found nothing. I have never seen such a phenomenon.
And the academicians "finished off" me when they began to say that "a meteorite exploded over Chelyabinsk." And only Velikhov reasonably said: "A meteorite flew over Chelyabinsk." And people mistook the shock wave for a meteorite explosion.
A stone found this week in Chebarkul Lake
And Vyacheslav Konstantinovich begins to explain to me how to correctly measure the distance "by the fingernail of an outstretched hand": at a distance of 40 kilometers, an observation object equal to the width of the nail will be 300 meters.
“The flying meteorite occupied only a third of the nail,” says Bakin, “but at a distance of about 80 kilometers. It turns out that the diameter of the object was 200 meters. From here it is not difficult to calculate the mass.
A red trail of a meteoroid in a clear sky was seen not only over Chelyabinsk, but in the Shumikhinsky district of the Kurgan region. What are its dimensions? Calculations show that with a width of five to seven kilometers, the "tail" stretches as much as 200 kilometers. Therefore, there were so many witnesses of the phenomenon. But car DVRs distorted the picture. Wide angle optics are known to round the edges of an image. Therefore, the trail from the meteoroid in their record repeats the radius of the Earth and does not show a direct flight and departure into space. Hence the delusion - fell!
The space object had an irregular shape. Rotated clockwise and initially shone, according to eyewitnesses in Shumikha, a red-yellow light. The "Guest" flew 200 kilometers in 8 - 9 seconds at a speed of 22 - 25 kilometers per second, leaving a trail at an altitude of 20 kilometers!
- I, like everyone else, at first believed, - Bakin admits, - that the object flew low and its train was short. It seemed that a shock wave had formed over Chelyabinsk. But the facts forced us to look in a new way.
So, it carried over. He flew away, but what did he "promise"? I wonder where he’s wearing it now.
