A meteor burnt up in a blinding fireball Friday over central Russia, creating a shockwave that blew out windows and collapsed some walls, leaving about 1,000 people injured, DPa reported.
The space rock, thought to have weighed nearly 10 tons, streaked at 18 kilometres per second across a clear morning sky over the Urals region, stunning and panicking residents.
The shockwave rattled buildings, damaged roofs and shattered windows, while super-heated fragments rained down in parts of the Chelyabinsk region, 1,500 kilometres east of Moscow.
Local authorities said the biggest impact left a crater about 6 metres across on the edge of a frozen lake 80 kilometres west of Chelyabinsk city, which has a population of 1.1 million. Russian soldiers closed off the area.
Some 200 children were among the 1,000 injured, most bruised or cut by flying shards of window glass. About 40 people remained in hospitals, including two with serious injuries.
Residents reported rushing outside in fear at 9:23 am (0323 GMT) into the freezing cold, many suspecting an aircraft had exploded. Thousands witnessed the flash of the explosion and the meteor's trail of smoke.
"There was a big fireball which descended. The whole thing lasted just a few seconds," a resident told the Itar-Tass news agency, describing the images seen by millions in online amateur videos.
Paul Chodas, a NASA scientist who studies asteroids and meteors, told reporters the object would have "been brighter than the sun" for those on the ground in Russia and said such large meteors hit Earth on average about once every century.
It exploded with such force that it could be measured on global network of detectors designed to monitor nuclear blasts.
As residents and workers rushed out of buildings, the mobile phone system briefly collapsed under a flood of calls. All local schools and kindergartens stayed closed for the day.
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered emergency services to the region, with officials saying about 20,000 members of the civil defence and seven aircraft had been deployed.
A priority would be to repair the shattered windows of the 3,000 damaged buildings, amid winter temperatures as low as 20 degrees below zero, local authorities said.
The damage was estimated at 1 billion roubles (33.2 million dollars), local governor Michail Yurevich said.
There was no warning, in part because the meteor struck in daylight, when it could not be seen by any Earth-based telescopes, NASA's Bill Cook said.
It may have consisted of nickel and iron, which would explain how parts of it made it through the lower atmosphere without burning up, said Valeri Shuvalov of Russia's Academy of Sciences.
Television images showed a partially collapsed factory building.
The meteor had an estimated diameter of 15 metres and weighed 7 metric tons before it burnt up in the atmosphere and shattered some 19 to 24 kilometres above the Earth, NASA said.
Russian officials said the damage could have been far worse had the fragments hit a more populated area. The nearby nuclear facility of Mayak was not affected, local news reports said.
Substantial meteorites hit the Earth every couple of months, but they almost never hurt people because most of the planet is covered by oceans and sparsely inhabited areas, the ESA said.
The incident recalled a 1908 asteroid that levelled a large but sparsely populated area of Siberia, when a massive blast laid waste to 2,000 square kilometres of uninhabited Siberian forest - an area larger than London.
"This is the first time this has happened, at least as far our records go," ESA spokesman Detlef Koschny said. "Mostly they land in the ocean, in deserts or in Siberia, so nothing much bad happens."
NASA said the meteor was unrelated to the much larger asteroid, dubbed 2012 DA14, which harmlessly passed Earth 16 hours later from a different direction.
"It's an incredible coincidence to have them happening on the same day," Chodas said.
NASA scientists said "the trajectory of the Russian meteorite was significantly different than the trajectory of the asteroid 2012 DA14, making it a completely unrelated object."
NASA said the Russian meteor was still being analysed but had travelled from north to south relative to Earth, while the later asteroid was moving on an opposite course.
NASA broadcast real-time animation of the asteroid fly-by, and live or near real-time images from observatories in Australia.
The asteroid flew closest to Earth at 1925 GMT, when it was 27,600 kilometres from the planet's surface, NASA said.
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