A rock from space about 50 feet across (15 meters) and traveling about 44 times the speed of sound entered Earth’s atmosphere early on 15 February 2013. The meteor disintegrated at an altitude of 13 to 31 miles (13 to 50 km), creating a massive shock wave that damaged hundreds of buildings and injured more than 1,000 people in the Chelyabinsk region. There was no advance warning before the meteor appeared in the sky as it came from the sun side of the earth where telescopes are not faced.
Before entering the atmosphere, the object weighed about 7,000 tons. An early estimate of the energy of the Russian meteor explosion is that it equaled about 300 kilotons of TNT.
The Russian meteor is second only to an explosion that occurred in Siberia in 1908. In the so-called Tunguska event, a 130-foot-wide (40 m) object exploded, flattening trees over an 825-square-mile area (2,137 square km). Even larger impacts from space occurred before recorded human history.
Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration
The solar system was shaped by even bigger impacts from space. Fifty thousand years ago, a rock about 150 feet wide (46 meters) crashed into what is now Arizona. The crater is 0.7 mile in diameter (1.2 km). Impacts have occurred since the beginning of our solar system. In 1994, the planet Jupiter was assaulted by fragments from comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
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