In February 2013, a rock the size of a house exploded in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia. It injured roughly fifteen hundred people, and it never actually hit a single one of them. Their windows did that.
The Chelyabinsk meteor was about 20 meters across. It entered the atmosphere and detonated in an airburst with an energy on the order of thirty Hiroshima bombs, released high in the air. The shockwave blew in windows across the city, and the flying glass caused the great majority of the injuries. Nobody saw it coming, because it arrived from the direction of the Sun.
- Event: Chelyabinsk meteor
- Date: February 15, 2013
- Size: about 20 m
- Energy: ~30x Hiroshima (airburst)
- Injuries: ~1,500, mostly from glass
- Warning: none
The part we can actually control
Chelyabinsk was natural, sudden, and unstoppable, and it still caught an entire city off guard. That is the sobering case. Here is the useful one.
The objects we can genuinely do something about are the ones we made ourselves: the tens of thousands already in orbit, trackable today. We do not get to prevent every rock from space. We absolutely get to manage our own debris before it becomes the emergency. One of those problems has a solution we can build.
Nature gets to surprise us. Our own junk should not be allowed to.
Open the live tracker →Sources: Chelyabinsk meteor · NASA