The NASA simulated the destruction of the Chelyabinsk meteorite

The Chelyabinsk meteorite broke through the Earth’s atmosphere on February 15, 2013 and since then has been under the scrutiny of scientists around the world. Recently, researchers from the NASA asteroid threat assessment project were able to create a model of exactly how the meteorite exploded - the very process that caused such a bright flash of light.

20 meter gift

Fallen immediately after Valentine's Day, a 20-meter meteorite caused not only the excitement of the scientific community, but also a lot of jokes like “if a Chelyabinsk man promised to get a star from the sky on Valentine’s Day, he gets it.” Although the meteorite was really best seen in the Chelyabinsk region and, as a result, it was even named after this city, still the residents of some other regions of Russia and northern Kazakhstan felt the shock waves from a series of atmospheric explosions.

The unusual nature of the phenomenon led to the emergence of many theories of the appearance of a meteorite in the sky of the Earth - from secret trials of the military to the wrecked alien ship. However, fragments of the meteorite were soon found, and fantastic theories had to be swept aside. However, reality is not inferior to fiction: the fall of a meteorite of this size is really a very rare event, and therefore the last seconds of his life were especially interested in scientists.

Science of right fall

Such interest can be understood: understanding the meteorite destruction mechanisms, one can predict their potential danger to the Earth’s population in the future. This is what the NASA asteroid threat assessment project does. Using supercomputer calculations, physicists were able to simulate a meteorite falling to its complete destruction, which caused a shock wave.

In fact, a lot of processes are involved in the fall of meteorites, which are very difficult to model. In particular, this is the friction of a meteorite on the dense layers of the atmosphere. Friction causes a strong heating of the cosmic body, the rocks entering it partially melt. In addition, often researchers simply do not have enough data for accurate models. The Chelyabinsk meteorite in this regard provides a large database: hundreds of video recorders and cameras shot it down.

Thanks to a detailed study of the meteorite’s fall over Chelyabinsk, physicists were able to obtain a picture of its destruction to within a split second, as well as “try on” its fall on various hypothetical places on Earth. This, for example, allowed us to conclude that in the event of a fall on water a meteorite would not have caused a strong tsunami, although it was previously believed that cosmic bodies at high speed could “catch a wave”.