ALBANY, N.Y. -- Meteorites fall to Earth fairly often, about five to ten land each year, but a strike the size of Russia's blast – 7,000 tons -- is unusual.
When the meteorites come through the Earth's atmosphere, they're going faster than the speed of sound, so you get big sonic booms. But also perhaps an explosion event from the meteorite itself because of differential pressure on the front versus the back they can actually explode.
Laurie Leshin, a Meteoriticist and the Dean of the School of Science at RPI, has studied meteors for years. Yet she has never seen video like that out of Russia Friday.
"The meteor that was observed in Russia this morning that obviously caused some injuries and damage is pretty large. It was probably the size of a bus and so these events are kind of decadal in time scale. So it might be once a decade, or once every few decades," said Leshin.
Yet what also makes this event so interesting is its timing. This afternoon, as asteroid the size of half a football field, is making a pass by the earth at the closest distance ever recorded for similarly sized objects, even close enough to be within the orbit of our satellites. So are these events related, or are they pure cosmic coincidence?
"It looks like no, we need to reconstruct the orbit of this object that entered in Russia this morning which we can do because we have so many great videos of it. It looks like it was coming from the other direction. It would be pretty hard for those two things to be related," said Leshin.
And while this meteor may have been too small to detect, other larger ones loom out there, big enough to have potentially catastrophic consequences.
"We need to be very mindful of the fact that we interact with our space environment all the time, especially through events like this. So learning what's out there, being able to save ourselves from when something larger comes by is an important thing to be working on," said Leshin.
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