Meteorite Chelyabinsk: Features of Destruction
- 1 Astrophysical Department of Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia
Abstract
A space object exploded near the city of Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013. Meteorite fragments reached the Earth ’ s surface, and accordingly we may consider this space object to have been a meteorite. However, this event showed a number of features not corresponding to the destruction of a meteorite. The space object began to disintegrate at an altitude of 70 km when pressure (dynamical loads) on its front surface was ~6.7 × 10 3 N·m -2 . The substance from the object’s surface was not blown off by drops, as at ablation, but was dumped by jets over a distance up to 1 km. The trail of this space object visually reminded us of a jet aircraft’s contrail, made up of water. But there is no enough water at altitudes of 30 - 70 km. It may be assumed that the object itself delivered water to these altitudes. The calculation of gas rise over the trail showed that the temperature in some parts of this trail was about 900 K. Heating of large masses of gas can be explained not only by the release of kinetic energy of the space object, but also by combustion processes of its substance. Thus, it was concluded that the meteorite could have been delivered by a comet.
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