• After studying Russian meteor blast, experts get set for the next asteroid

    The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd takes a "deep dive" look into the meteor that hit Russia and why NASA did not have earlier notice of its coming. Rep. Rush Holt explains NASA's tracking system and discusses budget cuts to NASA and the department's future.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    The meteor that blew up over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk 11 days ago has provided a new focus for the effort to establish an international asteroid warning system, one of NASA's top experts on the issue says.

    Lindley Johnson, the executive for the Near Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said that the Feb. 15 impact is certain to become "by far the best-documented meteor and meteorite in history" — but at the time, he and his colleagues could hardly believe it was happening.

    "Our first reaction was, 'This can't be. ... This must be some test of a missile that's gone awry,'" Johnson told NBC News.

    The Chelyabinsk meteor exploded at an estimated altitude of 12 miles (20 kilometers) over the city of 1.1 million in Russia's Urals Mountains, setting off a shock wave that blew out windows, caused an estimated $33 million in property damage and injured more than 1,200 people.

    It was doubly coincidental for Johnson and his colleagues: The meteor was thought to have been caused by the breakup of a 17-meter-wide (55-foot-wide), 10,000-ton asteroid that entered Earth's atmosphere and released the equivalent of 500 kilotons of TNT in explosive energy. All this happened just hours before a 45-meter-wide (150-foot-wide) asteroid, capable of setting off a city-killing blast, passed within 17,200 miles (27,680 kilometers) of our planet. Adding to that coincidence, researchers from around the world were gathered in Vienna for talks aimed at moving forward with an international network to deal with ... asteroid threats!

    The spectacle in Russia "certainly brought renewed interest to our efforts here," said Johnson, a leader of NASA's delegation to the Vienna talks.

    He said the recommendations from the researchers were "well-received" and are moving up the ladder to the next phase in a U.N.-led process for addressing outer-space threats. An action plan could be considered by the U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space during its next meeting in Vienna in June.

    Johnson summarized the three main points of the recommendations:

    • Set up an international asteroid warning network, or IAWN, supported with existing detection assets but incorporating additional contributions. "The basis of such a network already exists," Johnson said, thanks to NASA, the European Space Agency, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center and the NEODyS asteroid-tracking center at the University of Pisa in Italy. NASA also has partnered with the U.S. Air Force to share tracking data about near-Earth objects. Just this week, a $25 million Canadian-built satellite known as NEOSSat was launched to look for small asteroids in Earth-threatening orbits.
    • Bring the world's space agencies together in a new working group called the Space Mission Planning and Advisory Group — also known as SMPAG (pronounced like "Same Page"). The group's purpose, Johnson said, would be to "get all the agencies on the 'same page' as far as assessing what capabilities could be brought to bear should there be a threatening asteroid detected."
    • Put asteroid experts in contact with countries around the world, to advise disaster response agencies about the nature of a potential impact event — that is, the area expected to be affected, the potential effects and the scale of the evacuation if necessary. "It's an offshoot of the warning network," Johnson said. If the asteroid behind the Russian meteor had been detected in advance, for example, the expert network might have advised emergency workers about the potential for a midair blast and the resulting shock wave (although Johnson said he was "surprised" by the shock wave's effect).

    Until last year, NASA spent about $4 million a year to track near-Earth objects, or NEOs, and Johnson said the program "has accomplished quite a bit in the relatively short time that it's been in existence." About 95 percent of the potentially threatening asteroids bigger than a kilometer (half-mile) wide have been detected. However, now NASA is working on charting the asteroids down to a width of 100 meters (330 feet). To fund that more difficult task, the annual funding level for NEO research was raised to $20 million a year.

    NASA is using that money to beef up its capabilities for spotting smaller asteroids, through programs such as the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS, which is due to get $5 million over the next five years. Less than a million dollars a year is going toward studies aimed at figuring out what to do if a threatening asteroid is found, Johnson said. After all, you have to identify the risky rocks before you can do anything about them. The potential strategies range from diverting it gently with the aid of gravity tractors or space paintball guns, to blasting it with nukes, Bruce Willis-style.

    "It really depends on the scenario that we'd be faced with," Johnson said. "It depends on how big the object is. It depends on how long we have to do something about it. And if we do the search-and-detection job right, we will find a potential hazard many years if not decades before it becomes an immediate threat. There may be technologies available at that time that we never thought about. I don't get too worked up about trying to find an immediate technology that we've got to have right now to do that. Our focus is to find them as early as we can, and have the maximum amount of time to do something about it."

    Update for 7:30 p.m. ET Feb. 26: Looking for a practical tip? The large majority of the people injured by the meteor blast were hurt by flying glass, which led Johnson to give this advice during a Vienna news conference: "When you see a white flash and a large trail in the sky, it's probably not a good time to stand at the window and look at it, because it may be a blast coming."

    Update for 8:15 p.m. ET Feb. 26: As reported in Technology Review's Physics arXiv Blog, Colombian researchers used video from dashboard cameras and other sources to reconstruct the orbital path of the Russian meteor — and they classified it as an Apollo asteroid, a type of space rock whose path crosses Earth's orbit. That's consistent with NASA's analysis, which said the asteroid traced an orbit that ranged between the main asteroid belt and the region of outer space inside Earth's orbit.

    "The preliminary orbit indicates it takes about 2.1 years to go around the sun once ... so this thing was out at its farthest distance from the sun roughly a year ago," Bill Cooke, head of the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, told reporters during a Feb. 15 teleconference.

    The space rock was on its way back out toward the main asteroid belt, coming from Earth's sunward side, when it entered the atmosphere and blew up. That's why it wasn't possible to predict the impact in advance: At a width of 55 feet, the object was too small to show up in traditional sky surveys, and it would have been lost in the sun's glare during its final approach.

    So far, searchers have recovered just bits and pieces of the shattered space boulder. "The largest I've heard is a kilogram and a half," or about three pounds, Johnson told NBC News. 

    NASA budgeted $20 million dollars last year to look for objects that may hit the earth, but some scientists say more money should be spent on detection and ways to avoid a possible collision. NBC's Michelle Franzen reports.

    Slideshow: Meteor streaks over Siberia

    Yekaterina Pustynnikova / Chelyabinsk.ru via AP

    Click through scenes from Russia's Chelyabinsk region, where a huge meteor fireball set off alarms, injured hundreds of people and caused a factory roof to collapse.

    Launch slideshow

    More about asteroids:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    This story was originally published on Tue Feb 26, 2013 6:23 PM EST

  • Nuclear-like in its intensity, Russian meteor blast is the largest since 1908

    A massive meteor hit the Earth's atmosphere, creating a giant shock wave that injured more than 1,000 people. On the same day, an asteroid half the size of a football field came within 17,200 miles from Earth. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

    By Alan Boyle and Matthew DeLuca, NBC News

    A meteor flared through the skies over Russia's Chelyabinsk region early Friday, triggering an atomic bomb-sized shock wave that injured more than a thousand people, blew out windows and caused some Russians to fear the end of the world.

    NASA said it was the largest reported fireball since the Tunguska event in 1908 — an asteroid explosion that flattened millions of trees over 820 square miles of remote Siberian forest.

    Friday's event was witnessed by throngs of Russians in Chelyabinsk, a city of 1.1 million in western Siberia. Multiple amateur videos posted online showed the meteor’s flaring arc stretching hundreds of miles across the sky. Other videos from the scene captured the sound of a loud boom, followed by a cacophony of car alarms. One video showed the hurried evacuation of an office building in Chelyabinsk.

    “There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people’s houses to check if they were OK,” Chelyabinsk resident Sergey Hametov told The Associated Press. “We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound.”

    Another resident described the meteorite's flash.

    "I was standing at a bus stop, seeing off my girlfriend," Andrei, a local resident who did not give his second name, told Reuters. "Then there was a flash and I saw a trail of smoke across the sky and felt a shock wave that smashed windows."

    The impact involved a 50-foot-wide (15-meter-wide), 7,000-ton asteroid that zoomed in from space at a velocity of 40,000 mph (18 kilometers per second), NASA officials said. They said the shock of atmospheric entry blasted the rock apart at a height of 12 to 15 miles (20 to 25 kilometers), releasing the energy equivalent of 300 to 500 kilotons of TNT. That's more than 10 times the energy released by the atom bombs that exploded over Japan at the end of World War II. In fact, NASA said its estimates were based on readings from infrasound sensors that were set up by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization to detect nuclear blasts.

    The fireball hit just hours before a 150-foot-wide asteroid, known as 2012 DA14, came within 17,200 miles of Earth during an unusually close but harmless flyby. NASA officials said there was no connection between the two events. "It's simply a coincidence," said Paul Chodas, an asteroid researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

    NASA said the flash momentarily shone brighter than the sun — an assessment that was echoed by eyewitnesses in Chelyabinsk.

    "I was driving to work, it was quite dark, but it suddenly became as bright as if it was day," Viktor Prokofiev told Reuters. "I felt like I was blinded by headlights.”

    No fatalities were reported, but Russia's Interior Ministry said about 1,100 people sought medical care after the shock wave. About 50 were hospitalized. Most of the injured were cut by glass from windows that were shattered by the blast's shock wave. More than 200 children at Chelyabinsk schools were said to be among the injured.

    Chelyabinsk resident Marat Lobkovsky's experience was typical: "I went to see what that flash in the sky was about," he told AP. "And then the window glass shattered, bouncing back on me. My beard was cut open, but not deep. They patched me up, it’s OK now."

    Another city resident, Valya Kazakov, said the brilliant flare and loud explosion caused older women in his neighborhood to fear that the world was ending.

    City officials told AP that 3,000 buildings in the Chelyabinsk region were damaged, including a zinc factory warehouse that lost its roof and part of a wall because of the shock wave's battering. Russia's Itar-Tass news agency said as many as 10,000 police were mobilized to aid in the recovery and remove debris.

    There were no significant disturbances to public utilities or communications, Vladimir Stepanov of the Emergency Situation Ministry told Itar-Tass. "No serious consequences have been so far recorded," Stepanov said. "There has been no disruption in the rail and air transport work."

    A search was conducted to find any fragments that survived when the space rock blew itself apart. A photo provided by the Chelyabinsk regional police department showed a 20-foot-wide (6-meter-wide) hole in the ice covering a lake near the town of Chebakul where some of the fragments reportedly fell.

    Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, speaks to NBC's Lester Holt about the meteor and asteroid that approached Earth on Friday.

    The shallow angle at which the meteor crossed the sky over Chelyabinsk contributed to the amount of damage, according to Margaret Campbell-Brown, an astronomer and physicist at the University of Western Ontario. “It’s like a sonic boom,” Campbell-Brown said of the shock wave. “A sonic boom from a plane can shatter windows, but this sonic boom was much stronger than a plane."

    It was a once-in-a-decade event, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson told TODAY on Friday. He explained that the meteor impact was the physics equivalent of hitting a brick wall. “When you hit a brick wall, you basically explode, and that’s what happened here, and it exploded in midair,” Tyson said.

    Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for the world's nations to develop a system to intercept objects falling from space. "At the moment, neither we nor the Americans have such technologies" to shoot down meteors or asteroids, he said, according to the Interfax news agency.

    Coincidentally, experts from NASA and other agencies were at a U.N. space conference in Vienna on Friday to discuss strategies for developing an asteroid early warning system.

    Slideshow: Meteorite showers in Siberia

    Yekaterina Pustynnikova / Chelyabinsk.ru via AP

    A huge meteor flared through the skies over Russia's Chelyabinsk region, triggering a powerful shock wave that injured nearly a thousand people, blew out windows and reportedly caused the roof of a factory to collapse.

    Launch slideshow

    More about cosmic impacts:

    This report includes information from The Associated Press and Reuters.

    The videos just keep streaming in from Chelyabinsk. You'll find lots of great clips and stills on this Live Journal page and this WBVF wrap-up. Thanks to my Twitter pals for passing them along.  

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    This story was originally published on Fri Feb 15, 2013 5:05 AM EST