http://en.rian.ru/rian/index.cfm?prd_id=160&msg_id=3345630&startrow=1&date=2003-07-25&do_alert=0
VITIM METEORITE WAS PROBABLY A COMET Russian Information Agency Novosti July 25, 2003 MOSCOW - Russian scientists who have investigated the place where the so-called Vitim meteorite fell presume that what hit the taiga was a small comet. The object concerned was a large celestial body with a supposed weight of about 100 tons, which at the end of September of last year fell into the basin of the Vitim River in Eastern Siberia. Witnesses claim that they saw a glowing object hurtle through the air and break up into small pieces and then heard a powerful explosion. A fire started in the place of the fall, within a radius of 3 kilometres. Because these localities are hard to reach, the investigators did not arrive there until this summer. Members of the Russian expedition said they failed to discover metal remnants in the place of the fall. Besides, the character of damage and the radiation background at the explosion epicentre are substantially different from the aftereffects of the fall of a meteorite, believe the scientists. The meteorite version is also disproved by the fact that edges of meteorites are usually fused, and fragments of the celestial body have a dense metallic structure. The fragments found by the scientists resemble sandstone and "crumble in hands", one of the expedition participants Vadim Chernobrov, head of the Kosmopoisk research association, told RIA Novosti. According to him, some data, however, fail to confirm the comet theory. "The local water was found to contain tritium, a special kind of radioactive hydrogen, and that is rather strange for comets," thinks Chernobrov. Although near midnight on September 24, 2002, the flying object above Eastern Siberia was registered, according to the US Defence Department, by an American military satellite, members of the Russian expedition do not rule out that they deal with a rare natural phenomenon - a giant ball lightning or an ejection of special subterranean minerals that disintegrate into water and gas. Final conclusions will be made later. The investigations on the site of the blast are continuing. As estimated by specialists, it was an explosion of such a force that if the supposed fire-ball had fallen on Moscow, half of the Russian capital would have turned into desert, a nd the other half into ruins. ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
