The military refutes the version that the plane attacked a meteorite flying over the Chelyabinsk region and shattered it into small pieces.
After the morning incident, there were rumors that a meteorite flying to the South Urals from a bomber was broken into small pieces, so at first there was a powerful flash, then a powerful explosion, followed by several more.
An informed source at the Shagol airbase, where the military aviation squadron is based, called all these assumptions fiction, without any basis.
“At that time, military bombers were not flying. Currently, the flights are carried out as usual,”the source said.
The Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region, Mikhail Yurevich, expressed the official version of the event that happened in the morning: "A meteorite or asteroid flew past, leaving a shock wave behind."
The life support systems of the region are working as usual, firefighters, doctors, the Ministry of Emergency Situations and the police have been put on high alert. The region is monitoring the chemical and radiation situation.
“Now the main thing is to keep warm in apartments and institutions where the glass was broken in order to prevent the heating system from defrosting,” Yurevich stressed. 367 people turned to hospitals in Chelyabinsk as of 13:00. Appeals were recorded in five more municipalities.
The governor urged residents of South Urals not to panic, assured that the situation was under control and promised to deal with it in two days.
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Meanwhile, more than five hundred victims of the meteorite have already turned to local medical institutions - mainly injuries associated with injuries from flying glasses. The condition of 9 people is assessed as serious. Among those who applied there were 10 children, mainly pupils of school No. 130 in Chelyabinsk, whose windows were severely damaged by the shock wave.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, being in Krasnoyarsk at an economic forum, was inspired by this natural phenomenon and compared the event at which he is with a meteor shower. What he meant specifically - Medvedev did not explain.
At the same time, some officials are still expressing a dull, but nevertheless, dissatisfaction with the military and astronomers, who missed all this, as it turned out, it was by no means a harmless matter and could not warn the population ahead of time.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of the Russian defense industry complex, hastened to speak in the style that he had long warned about the cosmic danger, and that the construction of a missile shield for all planets should be started immediately.
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The meteorite over the Urals was included not only in the history of the region, but also in the list of global trends in the Twitter microblogging service - the rating of the most popular topics discussed by users included the hashtags #meteorite, #Chelyabinsk, #Russian Urals. In addition, renowned astronomers and industry journalists continue to discuss the topic with the hashtag #RussianMeteor.
What it wasn't
According to astronomers, the "meeting" of the Ural meteorite and asteroid 2012 DA14 is very likely a coincidence. Russian astronomers emphasize that a sufficiently small body like this asteroid (its size is about 45 meters) is unlikely to be accompanied by a "swarm" of smaller objects, so both space objects are almost certainly "acting independently."
Astronomer Leonid Yelenin, an employee of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, also notes that the trajectories of the two objects do not correspond to each other - according to preliminary data, the car flew from northeast to southwest, in fact, "in the opposite direction" in relation to how it should an asteroid will fly. 2012 DA14 on Friday will fly at a distance of about 27.7 thousand kilometers from the Earth's surface, which is significantly lower than the orbit of geostationary satellites (35.8 thousand kilometers).
So far, it can be said unequivocally that the Chelyabinsk "guest" could not be a comet - comets, as a rule, do not reach the Earth's surface. Director of the Zvenigorod Observatory of the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences Sergei Barabanov explained to RIA Novosti that the ice bodies of comets are destroyed already in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and if debris falls, then it is definitely not a comet.
In addition, comets at the distances of the Earth's orbit, as a rule, already have a tail and a large gaseous envelope and are well visible to astronomers - it is unlikely that a comet would be unnoticed near the Earth, the scientist believes.
What was it
Most likely, the space visitor is really interesting from a scientific point of view: it may belong to a rather rare type of iron-nickel meteorites - only such objects are strong enough to reach the lower atmosphere.
Valery Shuvalov, an employee of the Institute of Dynamics of Geospheres of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that the bolide was probably about a meter in size and weighing on the order of several tons. The space object collapsed in the atmosphere into a cloud of debris, which flew away, creating a shock wave and radiation.
Most of the stone meteorites, the so-called carbonaceous chondrites, are destroyed in the upper atmosphere, so the Ural specimen, according to the scientist, should have been strong enough if it went down so low and caused such a strong shock wave.
What's next
A specialist from the Meteoritics Laboratory of the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry told RIA Novosti that no expeditions to the crash site are planned yet - the specialists do not yet have the funds for this.
The editor and columnist of the Novosti Kosmonavtiki magazine, Igor Lisov, believes that in Russia it is necessary to create a state contact center where people could report dangerous space objects approaching the Earth. According to him, now there is no such structure to which amateur astronomers who have discovered a potentially dangerous space object could turn.
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