"It looked like it was from a nuclear explosion," one witness said.
MOSCOW - People in a freezing industrial region of Russia saw a flash of blinding light before an explosion of flying glass Friday when a meteor streaked across the sky and blew up, injuring 1,100 people in what looked like a disaster out of a movie.
"I woke up hearing a blast. It felt like the whole building jumped up," said Igor Chudnovsky, a commercial director in the town of Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountain range. "I saw a light, it looked like it was from a nuclear explosion, like I had seen in documentaries."
While NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed an estimated 7,000 tons, it exploded with the force of 20 atomic bombs.
Luckily, "the atmosphere absorbed the vast majority of that energy," said Amy Mainzer, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The meteorite arrived just hours before an asteroid named the 2012 DA14 was due to come within 17,000 miles of Earth at 2:24 p.m. ET, a record close-approach for an asteroid this size.
Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science, called the back-to-back celestial events an amazing display.
"This is indeed very rare and it is historic," he said on NASA TV. "These fireballs happen about once a day or so, but we just don't see them because many of them fall over the ocean or in remote areas. "
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