SAVANNAH, GA (WTOC) -
Eight hours sounds like a long time, but not when you're talking about a meteor. Former NASA scientist Chuck Watson says that's how close the Georgia and South Carolina coasts were from being hit by the giant space rock. Instead, it slammed into Cheylabinsk, Russia.
Folks could actually see and hear the meteor race across the sky and slam into a lake just outside Cheylabinsk. Watson says all the damage wasn't from the meteorite.
"It wasn't chunks of rock causing all that damage," he explained. "All that damage was the hypersonic shockwave of the meteor exploding 18 miles high."
Watson says most meteors break apart 30 miles in the air, making this incident in Russia very unique.
"This was basically the equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb, about 15 kilotons," Watson said. "It's very rare for a person to actually be hit by a meteorite, and rare for a city to even have any damage."
Watson said the meteor that hit Russia was traveling about 35,000 miles per hour. It was about the size of a school bus. Watson says meteors this size hit the earth's surface about once every five years. So far, more than 1,100 people were hurt, but no one has died.
Watson said this Russian meteor shocked everyone, including scientists.
"Everybody was focused on DA-14, the asteroid that's passed by the Earth around 2:30 p.m. Friday afternoon," Watson said. "This particular object caught everybody by surprise. Initially folks were saying it was related, but they're on different orbits. So, if you pardon the expression, it was an astronomical coincidence."
As if one meteor wasn't scary enough, this is actually the second time this area in Russia has been struck by space matter. A comet struck near the same site back in 1908. A very dangerous area for another space rock to strike.
"This was a bad place for the meteor to come down. If you can imagine a meteor hitting the Savannah River Site, that's basically what happened here. Cheylabinsk is where the Russian nuclear material processing plants are located."
Even scarier, if the meteor hit eight hours earlier, it may have been folks along the Georgia and South Carolina coastlines cleaning up the mess. Watson says even if this meteor splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, our coastline would still take a beating in the form of a tsunami.
Watson told WTOC there is special software and tracking devices that can pick up most meteors before the hit. But the system is costly, around $10 billion.
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Former NASA scientist Chuck Watson
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