Divers searched a lake near the city of Chelyabinsk, where a hole several metres wide had opened in the ice, but had so far failed to find any large fragments, officials said. Search teams said they had found small objects up to about 1 cm wide that might be fragments, but no larger pieces.
The scarcity of evidence on the ground has fuelled scores of conspiracy theories over what caused the fireball and the huge shockwave that hit Chelyabinsk, which plays host to many defence industry plants.
Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky told reporters in Moscow it could have been "war-mongers" in the United States. "It's not meteors falling. It's a new weapon being tested by the Americans," he said.
A priest from near the explosion site called it an act of God. Social media sites were flooded with speculation about what might have caused the explosion.
"Honestly, I would be more inclined to believe that this was some military thing," said Oksana Trufanova, a local human rights activist.
Asked about the speculation, an official at the local branch of Russia's Emergencies Ministry simply replied: "Rubbish".
Residents of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow, heard an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave that blew out windows and damaged the wall and roof of a zinc plant.
The meteor travelled through the atmosphere at 19 miles per second, according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, leaving a long white trail visible as far as 125 miles away.
NASA estimate the object was around 55 feet across before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.
It exploded miles above Earth, releasing nearly 500 kilotons of energy - about 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two, NASA added.
"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones."
The Chelyabinsk regional governor said the strike caused about 1 billion roubles ($33 million) worth of damage.
Life in the city had largely returned to normal by Saturday although 50 people were still in hospital. Officials said more than 1,200 people were injured, mostly by flying glass.
Repair work had to be done quickly because of the freezing temperatures, which sank close to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) at night.
Read more at The Telegraph
No comments:
Post a Comment