Last February a meteor blast over central Russia and delivered the biggest astronomical punch felt on Earth in a century, report scientists.
The 500-kiloton-or-stronger "airburst" over Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013, points to a higher-than-expected threat from similar small asteroids in the future.
Published by the journals Science and Nature, the three related analyses combine data from satellites, seismometers, dashboard cameras, damage surveys, and asteroid fragments to look at the Chelyabinsk event.
In the studies, the international impact teams re-created the roughly 20-meter-wide asteroid's 68'400 kilometer-per-hour with estimated energy equivalent of approximately 500 (±100) kilotons of trinitrotoluene (TNT, where 1 kiloton of TNT = 4.185×1012 joules) collision with Earth's atmosphere.
The event injured about 1'500 people and damaged thousands of buildings in a part of central Russia that is home to one million people.
Scary stuff, when you know there are more rocks bouncing around out there in space and that we have limited capability to pro-actively scan the skies for incoming objects!