A catalog of video records of the 2013 Chelyabinsk superbolide

Abstract

The Chelyabinsk superbolide of February 15, 2013, was caused by the atmospheric entry of a ∼19 m asteroid with a kinetic energy of 500 kT TNT just south of the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. It was a rare event; impacts of similar energy occur on the Earth only a few times per century. Impacts of this energy near such a large urban area are expected only a few times per 10 000 years. A number of video records obtained by casual eyewitnesses, dashboard cameras in cars, security, and traffic cameras were made publicly available by their authors on the Internet. These represent a rich repository for future scientific studies of this unique event. To aid researchers in the archival study of this airburst, we provide and document a catalog of 960 videos showing various aspects of the event. Among the video records are 400 distinct videos showing the bolide itself and 108 videos showing the illumination caused by the bolide. Other videos show the dust trail left in the atmosphere, the arrival of the blast wave on the ground, or the damage caused by the blast wave. As these video recordings have high scientific, historical, and archival value for future studies of this airburst, a systematic documentation and description of records is desirable. Many have already been used for scientific analyses. We give the exact locations where 715 videos were taken as well as details of the visible/audible phenomena in each video recording. An online version of the published catalog has been developed and will be regularly updated to provide a long-term database for investigators.

Spectral and orbital survey of medium-sized meteoroids

“…Our system observes meteor spectra of -1 up to -14 magnitude, corresponding to meteoroid sizes of a few mm up to a few decimeters. We expect that the same physical conditions fitted by the thermal equilibrium model applied for bright photographic meteors (Borovička 1993) as well as for fainter meteors (Borovička et al 2005) can also be assumed for the meteoroid population observed by our system. The effect of self-absorption in brighter meteor spectra was examined in individual cases.…”

“…Star identification and astrometry was performed using the RedSky software (upgraded from an earlier version of Kornoš et al 2018) based on the all-sky procedure of Borovička et al (1995). RedSky uses mathematical transformation for computing rectangular coordinates of catalog stars that are compared with measured stars.…”

“…There have been successful models of meteor radiation providing relevant results of relative abundances of the main elements. These models have been mostly applied to individual bright fireball spectra captured in high resolution (Borovička 1993;Trigo-Rodriguez et al 2003;Ferus et al 2018;Drouard et al 2018). In order to survey larger samples of meteor spectra, a simplified method of spectral classification (Borovička et al 2005) has been introduced, which is also applicable to more effective low-resolution video observations.…”

Characterization of the June epsilon Ophiuchids meteoroid stream and the comet 300P/Catalina

“…Star and meteor coordinates from each frame of each event were measured using the original AMOS software. Meteor photometry, astrometry and orbit determination was performed using the Meteor Trajectory (MT) software (Kornoš et al , 2018 based on the procedure of Ceplecha (1987) and Borovička et al (1995). The precision of the AMOS astrometry is on the order of 0.02 -0.03 • , which translates to an accuracy of tens of meters for atmospheric meteor trajectory.…”

“…This part of the spectrum lays in the region of high spectral sensitivity of the AMOS-Spec-HR (Matlovič et al 2019) and is typically used to characterize the spectral type of a meteoroid (Borovička et al 2005). The 500 -600 nm region was fitted by all contributing emission lines taken from published line lists (Borovička 1994a) and the NIST database (Kramida et al 2018). The intensities of the Na I -1, Mg I -2 and Fe I -15 multiplets were measured and their ratios were used for the spectral classification.…”