page_title: Chelyabinsk meteor
section_title: Initial reports
hierarchical_section_title: Chelyabinsk meteor / Initial reports
caption_attribution_description: English: Trajectory of Chelyabinsk meteoroid which fell into the lake Chebarkul. Source: Zuluaga, J.I. and Ferrin, I. "A preliminary reconstruction of the orbit of the Chelyabinsk Meteoroid.", ArXiv e-prints, arxiv:1302.5377 February 2013.
context_page_description: The Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia on 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT. It was caused by an approximately 20 m near-Earth asteroid with a speed of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second. It quickly became a brilliant superbolide meteor over the southern Ural region. The light from the meteor was brighter than the Sun, visible up to 100 km away. It was observed over a wide area of the region and in neighbouring republics. Some eyewitnesses also felt intense heat from the fireball.
  Due to its high velocity and shallow angle of atmospheric entry, the object exploded in an air burst over Chelyabinsk Oblast, at a height of around 29.7 km. The explosion generated a bright flash, producing a hot cloud of dust and gas that penetrated to 26.2 km, and many surviving small fragmentary meteorites, as well as a large shock wave.
context_section_description: Local residents witnessed extremely bright burning objects in the sky in Chelyabinsk, Kurgan, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen, and Orenburg Oblasts, the Republic of Bashkortostan, and in neighbouring regions in Kazakhstan, when the asteroid entered the Earth's atmosphere over Russia. Amateur videos showed a fireball streaking across the sky and a loud boom several minutes afterwards. Some eyewitnesses also felt intense heat from the fireball.
  The event began at 09:20:21 Yekaterinburg time, several minutes after sunrise in Chelyabinsk, and minutes before sunrise in Yekaterinburg.  According to eyewitnesses, the bolide appeared brighter than the sun, as was later confirmed by NASA. An image of the object was also taken shortly after it entered the atmosphere by the weather satellite Meteosat 9. Witnesses in Chelyabinsk said that the air of the city smelled like "gunpowder", "sulfur" and "burning odors" starting about 1 hour after the fireball and lasting all day.
caption: The meteor's path in relation to the ground.
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