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Friday Before a Three-Day Weekend Slow News Gorn Open Thread »
February 15, 2013
Tunguska 2 Averted by a Fraction of a Second
The Tunguska explosion involved a comet/asteroid at least 300 feet wide exploding 3-6 miles above Siberia in 1908. The meteor that detonated above a Russian city earlier today was far, far smaller, and went off at a far higher altitude. So how close did the city of Chelyabinsk come to doom?
Consider this: a ten-meter stony asteroid exploding at the altitude of the Tunguska visitor would pack the same punch as the Fat Man bomb. This rock was
much bigger, with a mass of 7000 tons. Had the explosion occurred a fraction of a second later in the meteor's descent, over a populated area like Chelyabinsk, most if not all of the dash cam owners who uploaded to youtube would have been fried, along with much of the town.