Chelyabinsk meteor explosion. Computer illustration coupled with satellite data, showing the distribution of the plume of debris (red) four days after a meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on 15th February 2013. The meteor measured 18 metres across and weighed 11000 metric tons. It entered Earth's atmosphere at 18.6 kilometres per second. Burning from the friction with Earth's air, it exploded 23.3 km above Chelyabinsk. The explosion released over 30 times the energy of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and deposited hundreds of tons of dust in the stratosphere, which formed a thin cohesive and persistent stratospheric dust belt (shown here). Satellite data from the Limb Profiler of the Ozone Mapping Profiling Suite, on the NASA-NOAA Suomi National