This has been a crazy week. We woke up Thursday to the news that Olympian Oscar Pitorius was arrested for the murder of his model girlfriend. In case you don’t remember, Pitorius, a South African, was the runner who had both legs removed below the knee in childhood. He was called the Blade Runner because of special prosthetics that allowed him to compete in both the Olympics and Paralympics. After his inspiring runs in the last Summer Olympics, he was treated like a hero, but then on Valentine’s Day, he shot his girlfriend dead, claiming she was an intruder.
Before I had hardly had time to recover from that shock, Russia suffered damage due to a meteor flying through the sky. Fortunately for all of us in the rest of the world, many Russians have dash cams in their cars (who knew?) and there are several breathtaking videos of it.
If you’ve seen any of the videos, you’ll understand when I say this meteor was frightening yet awesome at the same time. It was like watching a sci-fi movie to see the fireball traveling through the skin, brightly lighting up the vicinity with a blinding light, even thought it was daylight when it came through.
Most of the damage was due to the fact that the meteor released the energy about 30 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb dropped during World War II. I saw an office video of the boom the meteor caused, with windows blowing out and the people being knocked back by the blast.
NASA believes the meteor, which hit near Chelyabinsk, was about 55 feet wide and weighed about 10,000 tons when it entered our atmosphere. It exploded before it hit the earth, causing the shockwaves that injured about 1,000 people due to flying glass.
What’s scary is no one saw it coming. The good news is that NASA’s Paul Chodas said we could expect to see an event like this about every 100 years.