Meteor hit Russian city of Chelyabinsk earlier this month, injuring 1000 Astronomers have traced the origin of a meteor that hit Russia earlier this month, injuring more than 1000 people. Scientists from Colombia were able to plot the meteor's path through the Earth's atmosphere and then reconstruct its orbit around the Sun, using amateur footage.
As the space rock burned up over the city of Chelyabinsk, the shockwave blew out windows and rocked buildings, according to details published on the Arxiv website.
Using the footage taken on camera-phones and CCTV and the location of the impact into Lake Chebarkul, Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin, who are based at the university in Medellin, used simple trigonometry to calculate the height, speed and position of the rock as it fell to Earth.
The scientists then put their calculations into astronomy software. The results suggest the meteor belongs to a well known group of space rocks - known as the Apollo asteroids. Of about 9,700 near-Earth asteroids discovered so far, about 5,200 are thought to be Apollos.
The rocks regularly orbit the Earth but it seems the Chelyabinsk meteor (labelled ChM) was on an elliptical orbit around the Sun before it collided with Earth.
"It certainly looks like it was a member of the Apollo class of asteroids. Its elliptical, low inclination orbit indicates a solar system origin, most likely from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,” Dr Stephen Lowry, from the University of Kent, told the BBC.