Summary Of The Nova Special: Meteor Strike

When will the big one hit? Or has it hit already? In watching the Nova Special: Meteor Strike and the movie Armageddon we will look for fact or fiction. Did the movie get it right or was it just “bad” science. In Meteor Strike we follow Astrophysicist Peter Brown after a meteor strikes Chelyabinsk, Russia on February 15, 2013. We will see how Dr. Brown researches the explosion of a fireball over Russia, analyzes all the video footage, photos and evidence and comes to his conclusion of his initial hypothesis of the size of the blast.
We all have seen the movies where the Earth is getting destroyed by natural disasters. An asteroid the size of Texas is headed straight for us and we only have 18 days to stop it. We know that asteroids break apart in the Earth’s atmosphere, that scientist presume that approximately 65 million years ago a meteor struck Earth causing the death of the dinosaurs and that most asteroids are located in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter. What I didn’t know and what I have learned is that there are three different types of meteors that fall to Earth. There is stone, stoney iron and iron. These types of meteors are the same stuff that Earth and other planets are made of. I was shocked to learn that just 3 years ago on February 15 there was a meteor that struck Russia with more
Could this really work? what would happen with the radiation? Wouldn’t this cause smaller meteors to come down? Although the Nova Special explains a lot of good science in meteors hitting the Earth it does not answer these questions. It does compare that in the movie when the nuclear bomb explodes the asteroid breaks into two halves and in the Nova special on the same day that the meteor struck Russia without any notice NASA was tracking a second asteroid called DA14 that came within 18,000 miles from