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Divers locate meteorite impact craters on Russian lake bottom

Divers continuing the search of Lake Chebarkul have discovered several craters on the lake bottom that they believe are impact zones from the meteorite that exploded over the nearby city of Chelyabinsk on February 15th.

The search for fragments in the lake was initially called off due to frigid weather and stirred-up mud hampering their efforts, as well as some belief that the hole in the ice was created by some other means. However, when scientists confirmed that small, dark rocks found around the edge of the hole were indeed fragments of the meteor, divers resumed their work, using high-powered lights and probes to scour the lake bed.

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The divers located several craters pushed into the mud at the bottom of the lake, which they believe are where larger fragments of the meteor came to rest. Another team from Ekaterinburg is due to arrive tomorrow, bringing along magnetic survey gear to help confirm the divers' suspicions.

Meanwhile, according to RT.com, in addition to the numerous tiny meteorite fragments that have been located throughout the region, a skiing expedition in the nearby Russian Urals discovered a large, 1-kg chuck of the space rock — the largest fragment found so far.

Hopes are that larger fragments will be unearthed from the bottom of Lake Chebarkul, but in the mean time, a pair of Colombian astronomers teamed up with a blogger in Stockholm to reconstruct the path of the meteorite using video footage of the event.

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Using Google Earth and some basic high school math, blogger Stefan Geens watched how the meteorite flashed overhead in the many Youtube videos posted, and reconstructed its trajectory through the atmosphere. Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin, two astronomers with the University of Antioquia in Medellin, picked up the torch from there, and building on Geens' work, they expanded the meteorite's path out into space, plotting several orbits and then slowly narrowing it down to just one as they collected more information.

Their analysis, published last Thursday by the online science journal arxiv.org, showed that the rock was an Apollo asteroid — one of several thousand space rocks that orbit the Sun on paths that take them across Earth's orbit.

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