Meteorite | Chelyabinsk | Chondrite | 165g

Product detailed description

Some meteorites waited millions of years on Earth before they were discovered, while some we could watch them fall practically live. One of them is the Chelyabinsk meteorite.

It was 9 a.m. on Friday, February 15, 2013, when the sky lit up over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Hundreds of mobile phones, industrial cameras or in-car cameras captured the biggest recorded meteorite fall since 1908. It penetrated the atmosphere at about 65,000 to 72,000 km/h, with a diameter of 20 metres and a mass of about 19,000 tonnes. At an altitude of 30-40 km above the earth, it began to disintegrate, and it was at that moment that its brightness surpassed that of the sun. It hit the ground at 540 km/h, the largest part, weighing about 570 kg, broke through the ice of Lake Chebarkul and ended up at the bottom of the lake, from where it was later fished out.

Pieces of this meteorite are now sought after by collectors around the world, but on the day of impact, local people were convinced that it brought the end of the world. The impact of the meteorite released 500 kilotons of conventional explosive energy, equivalent to 30 times the force of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion. As a result, over 1 500 people were injured and some 7 000 buildings damaged. Over 24 000 people were deployed to repair the damage.

According to calculations, the Chelyabinsk meteorite probably came from asteroid 86039, about 2.2 kilometres in diameter, which was located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is a rock meteorite of the chondrite type, whose age is usually estimated at 4.56 billion years.