Meteorite | Chelyabinsk | Chondrite | 165g

Product detailed description

Some meteorites have waited millions of years on Earth to be discovered, while others we could witness falling in real time. The Chelyabinsk meteorite is one of them.

It was 9 a.m. on Friday, February 15, 2013, when the sky lit up over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Hundreds of mobile phones, CCTV cameras, and car cameras captured the biggest recorded meteorite fall since 1908. It entered the atmosphere at a speed of about 65,000 to 72,000 km/h, when it had a diameter of 20 metres and a mass of about 19,000 tonnes. At an altitude of 30-40 km above the earth, it began to disintegrate, and it was at that moment that its brightness overtook the sun. It hit the ground at 540 km/h, the largest part, weighing about 570 kg, broke through the ice of Lake Chebarkul and ended up at the bottom of the lake, from where it was later recovered.

Pieces of this meteorite are now sought after by collectors around the world, but on the day of the impact, local people were convinced that it would bring about the end of the world. The meteorite’s impact released 500 kilotons of conventional explosive energy, equivalent to 30 times the force of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion. This resulted in over 1,500 injured and some 7,000 buildings damaged. Over 24,000 people were deployed to repair the damage.

According to calculations, the Chelyabinsk meteorite probably came from the asteroid 86039 of about 2.2 kilometres in diameter located in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is a chondrite-type stony meteorite with an age usually estimated at 4.56 billion years.

Weight: 165.1 g
Location of discovery: Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian Federation
Composition: Olivine, feldspar, iron
Interesting fact: The largest recorded meteorite fall in more than a century