1,000 people injured by falling meteor in Russia

What happened

On the morning of February 15, 2013, a meteor streaked across the sky over Russia's Ural region and exploded about 9:20 a.m. local time. The blast's shockwave shattered glass across Chelyabinsk and surrounding towns — and the flying glass did the damage. Early reports put the injured at around 725 by noon Moscow time, climbing past 1,000 as the day wore on; the vast majority suffered cuts rather than serious injuries, though dozens were hospitalized. Around 270 buildings were damaged, mostly broken windows, and some 20,000 emergency workers were mobilized.

Amateur dashcam footage — Russia's roads being famously well-documented — captured the fireball: a bright white streak crossing the sky, then an even brighter flash and a deafening bang. The national space agency, Roscosmos, said a single meteoroid had entered the atmosphere, burned, and disintegrated, scattering fragments across three Russian regions and into Kazakhstan. One large chunk was later recovered from a lake in the Chelyabinsk region.

The cosmic coincidence

The Chelyabinsk meteor arrived on the same day that asteroid 2012 DA14 — about 45 meters long, half a football field — was due to pass Earth at just 17,100 miles, closer than some communications satellites. Scientists were quick to say the two were unrelated. "They are completely unrelated objects — it's a strange coincidence they are happening at the same time," NASA spokesman Steve Cole said. Don Yeomans, who managed NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, confirmed "no Earth impact is possible" from the asteroid.

Cole added a sobering note: objects like the Chelyabinsk meteoroid "fall fairly frequently, but when they fall into the ocean or desert, there is no impact on people — so this one is unusual in the sense that it's come over a populated area." Because meteoroids are small, they are hard to spot, and there is often little warning.

Tunguska's echo

For sky watchers, the event recalled the famous Tunguska event of 1908 in remote Siberia, when an asteroid exploded in the atmosphere and leveled an estimated 80 million trees across 820 square miles — about two-thirds the size of Rhode Island — without leaving a crater. Chelyabinsk was Tunguska's smaller, urban cousin: less destructive, but witnessed by a million people and their dashboard cameras.

The takeaway

No one saw it coming, and that is the point scientists kept making. The solar system throws rocks at us constantly; we notice only the ones that land where we live. On February 15, 2013, one of them landed on a Friday morning commute.

Archive summary, February 2013, based on CNN's original reporting: Meteor injures hundreds in Russia.