Russia meteor's origin tracked down
26 February 2013 Last updated at 04:25 ET
Russia meteor's origin tracked down
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
Astronomers have traced the origin of a meteor that injured about 1,000 people after breaking up over central Russia earlier this month.
Using amateur video footage, they were able to plot the meteor's trajectory through Earth's atmosphere and then reconstruct its orbit around the Sun.
As the space rock burned up over the city of Chelyabinsk, the shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings.
The team, from Colombia, has published details on the Arxiv website.
Numerous videos of the fireball were taken with camera phones, CCTV and car-dashboard cameras and subsequently shared widely on the web. Furthermore, traffic camera footage of the fireball had precise time and date stamps.
More:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21579422
= new reply since forum marked as read
...with some emphasis on preliminary, the abstract is here:
In February 15 2013 a medium-sized meteoroid impacted the atmosphere in the region of Chelyabinsk, Russia. After its entrance to the atmosphere and after travel by several hundred of kilometers the body exploded in a powerful event responsible for physical damages and injured people spread over a region enclosing several large cities. We present in this letter the results of a preliminary reconstruction of the orbit of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid. Using evidence gathered by one camera at the Revolution Square in the city of Chelyabinsk and other videos recorded by witnesses in the close city of Korkino, we calculate the trajectory of the body in the atmosphere and use it to reconstruct the orbit in space of the meteoroid previous to the violent encounter with our planet. In order to account for the uncertainties implicit in the determination of the trajectory of the body in the atmosphere, we use Monte Carlo methods to calculate the most probable orbital parameters. We use this result to classify the meteoroid among the near Earth asteroid families finding that the parent body belonged to the Apollo asteroids. Although semimajor axis and inclination of the preliminary orbit computed by us are uncertain, the rest of orbital elements are well constrained in this preliminary reconstruction.
Darn quick work get any solution to this problem so quickly (6 days).
Here's a very cool simulation of the 4 years leading up to the impact.
Special thanks to Sir Issac Newton for the Law of Universal Gravitation.
See also http://urania.udea.edu.co/sitios/facom/research/chelyabinsk-meteoroid.php
. . . . . .
...but I have to give more smilies to Newton than to Kepler.
Kepler was a number-cruncher, working from Brahe's observational skills and data. Kepler's analysis was through and profound in determining and formulating WHAT the planets did (Planetary Motion) .
Newton was the theoretician who captured the fundamental principles of all motion and of a universal force among all objects. Kepler's laws became consequences of Newton's laws. Newton's insights also highlighted errors (imprecisions) in Kepler's work that have since been measured. Newton explained WHY planets did what they did.
Would Newton have made his contributions to physics and astronomy if he had not been preceded by Kepler? Fun to speculate, but ... we can't change the past.
What's really cool is that only 400 years after Kepler and Newton, a couple of scientists can look at films of a meteoroid explosion, measure some angles, grab some GPS data, estimate some values, do a little programming, throw the data into a computer, run some iterations and refinements, and 6 days later publish a simulation of the meteor's origin and path through the solar system.
Is science great or what?? 
By the time he was what, 30? 
