Russia meteorite smoke plume circled the world in just four days

NASA scientists have revealed a new study of the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which shows that the smoke created when the meteorite burned up in our atmosphere traveled around the northern hemisphere in just four days.

In the aftermath of the meteorite explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia back on February 15th, attention was focused on the damage the explosion caused, the injuries sustained, whether this was related to Asteroid 2012 DA14 (and whether there would be any more hits!), and whether or not any fragments of the meteorite would be found. Very little attention was given to the smoke plume left behind by the meteor.

[ Related: Russia meteor was biggest in a century, shook the ground like an earthquake ]

However, someone was paying attention, as all that was going on, NASA was quietly using a polar-orbiting satellite called Suomi NPP to track the plume as it was carried off by the winds, and they found that this smoke and dust left behind tracked all the way around the northern hemisphere and back to Russia in just four days.

This new video comes out just a couple of days scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory unveiled a new image plotting the orbits of over 1,400 'potentially-hazardous asteroids' that are known to us.

I highly recommend the full version of that image, on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day site. It's really amazing that we're not hit by these big asteroids more often.

[ More Geekquinox: New hope for ‘Comet of the Century’ ISON? ]

In other 'asteroid news', with NASA's plan to find an asteroid and tow it back to Earth, as well as efforts of space mining companies like Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, researchers with the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, UK have crawled through records of the 10,000 known near-Earth objects, and have identified a dozen that form a new category that may be of help to these missions.

These 12 Easily-Retrievable Objects (EROs) are between 2 and 60 metres in diameter, they're known to come relatively close to our planet, and they can be easily nudged into orbit of one of the stable Lagrange Points that exist around the Earth. Planetary Resources recently ran a Kickstarter fundraising campaign, where they raised over $1.5 million to build a space telescope that will search for more asteroids.

These kinds of missions will not only help us understand asteroids better, but they will provide us with new resources and give us valuable information on how to defend ourselves against possible impacts.

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