Chelyabinsk, Russia. A meteorite weighing approximately 10,000 tons and 15 meters in diameter hurtles through the atmosphere, leaving a bright vapor trail and illuminating everything brighter than the sun for a few seconds before disintegrating. It’s a fireball that entered the atmosphere at the incredible speed of 18 kilometers per second. 1,200 people are injured by shattered windows and collapsed windows. The American sensor network (a legacy of the Cold War) for detecting infrasound from foreign nuclear explosions estimates the blast to be 300,000 tons of TNT: about 20 times that of Hiroshima! The event is captured by countless cameras now standard equipment on every Russian car.
