For the past week, news stations around the world have been mentioning an asteroid called DA14 is expected to pass extremely close to Earth some time on February 15. What we didn’t expect was for another completely unrelated 10-ton meteorite to crash to Earth earlier this morning in Chelyabinsk, Russia, which is located 950 miles away from Moscow.
When the meteorite entered the Earth’s atmosphere at around 9:20 a.m. local time, it flew across the sky at 33,000 mph and broke into pieces 18 to 32 miles above ground, according to a statement released by the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The blast of the meteorite hitting the ground created sonic blasts strong enough to shatter countless windows, which resulted in nearly 1,000 people to be injured.
A number of videos capturing both the meteorite’s descent as well as the Earth-shattering blast have made their way onto YouTube, one of which we made sure to highlight above as we feel it shows off the entire moment the best.
We’re hoping those who were injured during the meteorite’s crash into the Earth didn’t suffer any serious injuries and we’ll be wearing our bicycle helmets for the rest of the day until we know for sure asteroid DA14 has passed our planet.