THE meteor that streaked across the skies over Russia in a
blinding fireball on Friday struck Earth’s atmosphere with a
force about 30 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb, Nasa
scientists have said. Nasa estimate that the energy released by
the meteor’s impact with the atmosphere was 500 kilotonnes,
around 30 times the force of the nuclear bomb dropped on
Hiroshima in 1945. It entered the atmosphere and broke up at an
altitude of around 32 miles, causing a shockwave that blew out
windows and set of car alarms in Chelyabinsk two and a half
minutes later. Divers were this morning searching the
Chelyabinsk region’s frozen Lake Chebarkul for a fragment of the
meteorite. No fragments have been found in the region so far -
despite some 20,000 rescuers and recovery workers being
dispatched to help the hundreds of people injured. Scientists
from Nasa, the US space agency, estimated that the amount of
energy released from impact with the atmosphere was about 30
times greater than the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japa