According to unconfirmed reports, the meteorite was intercepted by an air defense unit at the Urzhumka settlement near Chelyabinsk. A missile salvo reportedly blew the meteorite to pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.
I'm still doubtful that happened but it is possible-ish. Here yet another picture of the factory is.
Wow! It looked quite real esp with all those videos and that flattened factory. Hope nobody was hurt. Could also have been space junk with all those old satellites in orbit up there! Wonder if there’s any fragments left to prove the actual thing that landed?
Space junk doesn’t fly that fast to cause this.
Believe that local Russians are already collecting fragments, will be very easy on the snow for the first few hours.
Judging from the pictures of the destroyed factory and from the news reporting several hundred injured people.. yes.
Dash cams are pretty much mandatory in Russia because of insurance fraud. There are lot of videos on youtube where people jump in front of a car to get some money.. or crash into each other and blame the other.. beat each other up in the middle of the street because of a crash.. and so on.
I saw the video of the “bright light” in the sky and had to think for a moment…… “is that one of our BLF members playing w/ his new 9X XML-U3? It’s hard not to be certain. The factory certainly looks like ”photon cannon” damage, notice the clean round opening in the wall. Only a tightly focused light beam will produce that, metorite strikes are ragged w/ scattered debris. I will now remove my tongue from my cheek…….
One of those videos has the day and the year wrong, know that guy is a accident scammer!
On another one, the overwhelming amount of ‘lumenescence’ is astonishing, seems to light up the whole neighborhood as it passes over - and I am sure tricks the light meter in the dash cam too.