so - was it REALLY a meteor?

Nah... I got it from the "freebeacon"...It was black-helicopters, all the way!

BOO!

bailey bud wrote: nyett........

top image -- tundra

---

bottom image --- hills, maybe even a small mountain.

The lake in the first image is with in the three areas that scientists believe fragments would have fallen, if there was any fragments (which are likely).

Scientists think a meteoroid entered the atmosphere above Russia's southern Chelyabinsk region, where it exploded and broke up into fragments scattered across three regions of Russia and Kazakhstan, according to news reports.

http://www.space.com/19816-russian-mete ... ignal.html

The second picture is not related to any fragments that may have hit the ground. Stony meteorites are cold when they hit the ground, and even a iron meteorite would only be warm to the touch. Meteorites do not travel through space or the sky with any sort of fiery trails (that's only in the movies). The contrails you see in the pictures are super heated gases from the atmosphere... as the surface of the meteorite heats and ablates (melts). And that ablation is only to a depth of about 2cm at any given point of super heating. It's the ablation of the surface that causes the bright burning.

A bolloid (the name given to the rock/iron when it is still in space) has been zipping around for about 3-4 billion years, at absolute zero, and a short trip through our atmosphere does very little to heat anything more than the very surface of the mass. The reason they explode and break apart is do to the stress, pressure and stored kinetic energy that is built up during entry.

So more info...

Russian Meteor Not Associated With Asteroid 2012 DA14
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
February 15, 2013

Preliminary information indicates that the fireball in Chelyabinsk,
Russia, is not related to asteroid 2012 DA14, which is flying by Earth
today.

The Russian fireball is the largest reported fireball since the 1908
Tunguska event. The fireball entered the atmosphere at 18 km per second.
The impact time was 3:20:26 UTC, and the energy released by the impact
was in the hundreds of kilotons. Based on the duration of the event, it
was a very shallow entry. It was larger than the fireball over Ind
onesia on Oct. 8, 2009. Measurements are still coming in, and a more
precise measure of the energy may be available later. The size of the
object before hitting the atmosphere was about 15 meters, the pre-impacting
asteroid was about 15 meters in diameter and had a mass of about 7,000 tons.
It was about 1/4 the size of asteroid 2012 DA14. The fireball trail was
visible for about 30 seconds, so it was a grazing impact through the
atmosphere. The fireball was brighter than the sun.

It is important to note that this estimate is preliminary, and some of the
estimates may be revised as more data is obtained.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-061

From JPL.

bailey bud wrote: nyett........

top image -- tundra

---

bottom image --- hills, maybe even a small mountain.

That's what I was talking about. As the video mentions (with the text superimposed), it looks like they superimposed a 40 year old natural gas fire in Derweze over the "crater" in the ice/snow.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2179622/The-Door-Hell-Giant-hole-Karakum-Desert-40-YEARS.html

But who knows what they did, it's kind of blurry. Bottom line is there was no fire burning in that "crater" in the snow/ice (first photo). Looks like a little creative editing to me.

Russian parliament member says meteor was actually a U.S. weapons test


Russian Duma member Vladimir Zhirinovsky dodges some sauerkraut thrown by an unidentified woman during a press conference in Kiev, Ukraine, where he had made some controversial remarks, as he often does. (Stringer/REUTERS)

No sooner do we write about the conspiracy theories flourishing on Russian social media about the meteor, which sailed over central Russia on Friday, than an actual member of the Russian government weighs in with his own. Or so the Moscow-sponsored outlet Voice of Russia says.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/15/russian-parliament-member-says-meteor-was-actually-a-u-s-weapons-test/

Conspiracy font not required, Vlad is a certifiable whack-o and says lots of outrageous things strictly for shock value and attention. If you need a good chuckle Google Vlad some time and enjoy reviewing the results.