RUSSIA: First Fragments Of Meteorite That Exploded Over Russian City - And Tests Show It DID Come From Outer Space. More Than 1,000 Were Injured As The Meteor Disintegrated Overhead.

The Daily Mail

PICTURED: First fragments of 'gold rush' meteorite that exploded over Russian city - as collectors claim the space dust could be worth £6,500

written by Matt Blake

Monday February 18, 2013

Scientists have found the first pieces of space rock that hurtled to Earth last week and exploded over a Russian city, kickstarting a 'gold rush' that could see each fragment fetch £6,500.

Experts have been scouring a 50-foot hole in a frozen lake on the outskirts of Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, believed to have been carved out when the fireball crashed to the ground.

And after three days of combing the ice for clues, they have finally unearthed fragments of stone which each have a strong magnetic field and emit unusually high traces of radiation - clear signs that it came from space.

Fragments have started to appear on Avito.Ru, a Russian website for classified ads. Many pieces were harvested around Chelyabinsk, where more than 1,000 were injured as the meteor disintegrated overhead.

One user asked for around £6,500 for a small piece, while another offered 18 pieces for £11 each. Residents of a village near Chelyabinsk searched the snowy streets, collecting stones they hoped would prove to be the real thing.

But not all were ready to sell. 'I will keep it. Why sell it? I didn't have a rich lifestyle before, so why start now?' a woman in a pink woollen hat and winter jacket, clutching a small black pebble, told state

television Rossiya-24.

Almost 1,200 people were injured when the meteor burst through the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 46,000mph on Friday, blowing out the windows of 900 schools and hospitals and damaging around 100,000 homes.

The debris narrowly missed a direct and devastating hit on the industrial city which has a population of 1.13 million but spread panic through its streets as the sky above lit up with a blinding flash.

On Saturday, divers searched the waters beneath the ice for traces of space rock but surfaced empty handed, leaving some experts questioning whether the hole was indeed formed by a piece of falling debris.

As it raced through the sky, the 50-foot wide chunk of space rock compressed the air ahead of it, creating the enormous temperatures that meant it exploded in a fireball somewhere between 18 and 32 miles above the ground at around 9.20am local time on Friday.

Although some debris fell to earth, ‘whipping up a pillar of ice, water and steam’ and creating a 20-foot-wide crater, the damage in nearby towns was actually caused by shockwaves created by the meteor breaking the sound barrier and then exploding.

Collectors from around the world will be keen to get hold of a piece. Film director Steven Spielberg is a noted collector. In October a 9in piece of the Seymchan meteorite found in Siberia in 1960 sold in New York for $43,750 (£28,200).

Astronomers have also revealed that the meteor could have hit UK cities if it had hit at a slightly different time of day.

Nasa said that when he meteor entered the atmosphere, it exploded with the force of a nuclear weapon.

The revelation, based on an analysis of the earth's rotation, comes a day after the Kremlin called on the world's most powerful countries to urgently develop technology and weapons systems to destroy asteroids and meteors that threaten Earth.

'Instead of fighting on Earth, people should be creating a joint system of asteroid defence,' demanded Alexei Pushkov, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and chairman of the Russian foreign affairs parliamentary committee.

He urged the US, Russia and China to join forces to create an Anti-Asteroid Defence System, warning this was far more urgent that the American priority of a European-based star wars defence system aimed at deterring attacks from rogue states.

Deputy premier Dmitry Rogozin made clear Russia will lead an international drive for such a move.

'I have already spoken of the need for an international initiative aimed at creating an early warning system that would also prevent extraterrestrial objects from coming dangerously close to the Earth,' he said.

'Humankind must create a system to identify and neutralize objects that pose a danger to the Earth.'

The disaster in the Urals - which led to damage to hundreds of buildings from a ten ton space fireball that had the force of a nuclear bomb - was a wake-up call to the world, which is not ready to cope with the threat, he warned.

'Russia and other major countries do have a system of space monitoring and control, but it is mainly geared towards monitoring instances when spacecraft may come dangerously close to space junk,' he said.

The key task was 'not waiting for new incidents to happen but handling problems in advance'.

He called on international players to pull their efforts together instead of 'piling up military stuff in space, aimed only at lowering our planet's defences'.

Rogozin expressed the hope this latest incident would make 'officials think of more important issues and look beyond the space horizon'.

There are some 1,300 space rocks on NASA's list of 'potentially hazardous asteroids' - yet many like the one that struck Chelyabinsk were not tracked in advance.

The US-based B612 Foundation, which includes NASA veterans, said Friday's close encounters amount to a wake-up call.

'Of the million asteroids as large as or larger than 2012 DA14, we have only tracked less than 10,000,' said the organisation.

Divers were yesterday scouring frozen Lake Chebarkul for remnants of the meteorite that struck on Friday with two monumental explosions, as 20,000 emergency workers cleared up the damage from broken glass, collapsed roofs and structural damage to buildings.

Former Kremlin minister Alexander Pochinok called for a joint US, Russian and EU initiative.

'We will clearly have a need to create near-earth stations, with stronger, advanced telescopes,' he said.

'Perhaps the calculations might show us that we can even bring nuclear weapons into orbit. It is impossible to envisage it now. It is a matter of calculations, we need to figure out what needs to be done to detect such meteorites, asteroids, to forecast them coming, to change their trajectory, to destroy them. These are tasks for physics and engineering.'

Leading scientist Andrei Kokoshin stressed: 'It is high time to create a common international centre for monitoring and responding to natural threats from space.

'The UN should create a special committee within its structure to coordinate efforts.'