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Sergey Khaibrakhmanov was sleeping when he heard the explosion. Startled, his heart already pounding, he jumped awake in bed. What the hell was that?
It was loud, whatever it was, enough to shake the apartment and scare him half to death. Did a plane just crash?
He edged to the side of his bed as debris sprinkled from the ceiling, speckles of dust and plastic tile, falling like snow in sporadic, sluggish patterns. The silence, eerily juxtaposed against the bang, was ominous, unreal even. His ears began to ring.
A breeze whistled inside from the direction of the balcony. The glass door — or what was left of it — lay in broken pieces on the carpet, sparkling like a tiny sea of diamonds. Shit.
Trying not to step on the shards with his bare feet, he climbed through the gaping frame and peered into the sky.
"I saw this enormous white trail. Big. Impressively big, like a cloud," he says. "I knew it was too large to have belonged to a plane."

A large trail left behind from a meteor explosion above Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013
Image: Sergey Khaibrakhmanov
The meteor was small, about 18 meters around, with an estimated mass of 13,000 metric tons. It entered Earth's atmosphere at 40,000 miles per hour, close to 60 times the speed of sound.
Cruising 14 miles above the ground, it exploded with the energy equivalent to 500 kilotons of TNT. The blast created a shock wave 30 times brighter than the sun, damaging some 7,000 buildings under its path. The spewing energy injured more than 1,400 people, most claiming harm from broken glass, like Khaibrakhmanov’s, which flew in from their windows after the explosion. Some were knocked off their feet; others suffered severe skin burns from the sheer brightness of the explosion.

In a library in Yemanzhelinsk, a town 30 miles south, a shattered window frame struck and cracked a statue of Pushkin. Witnesses in both the city and surrounding countryside say the area smelled like gunpowder for days.
In many ways, the explosion was a wake-up call, an unmistakeable message that the skies are filled with thousands of potential catastrophes-in-waiting. Furthermore, we don't employ hundreds of people to monitor for space rocks around the clock. Often our fate lies in the hands of amateur observers and research teams, some of which staff teams of eight or fewer.
Even so, the Chelyabinsk space rock did arrive at a crucial moment in technology. Scientists are discovering new ways to identify near-Earth objects (NEOs), just like Chelyabinsk, every day.
The main problem is politics regarding the funding and overall priority of NEO-tracking: whether better asteroid telescopes are worth the investment over, say, exploratory missions to Mars. The conflicts make it difficult to move forward.
One group is even choosing to bypass government funding all together. It aims to crowdsource funding for a space telescope that would hunt approaching rocks from an Earth-like orbit around the sun. Other inventors are designing technologies to deflect approaching rocks, one of which would use a spacecraft's gravitational pull to nudge an asteroid off its course.
While specifics about asteroid tracking and prevention continue to be fuzzy, the lingering question remains: When it’s our entire civilization at risk, is it better to be safe than really, really sorry?

Stephen Larson, a senior staff scientist at the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona, has been tracking asteroids since 2004.
The program, funded by NASA, uses three telescopes in the mountains north of Tucson to survey the sky each night, from dusk to dawn. Their focus is to catalogue existing rocks, with a specific emphasis on NEOs en route to the planet. To date, they’ve located more than 6,000 NEOs, about two-thirds of all such objects discovered.
"The idea for this started in the mid-nineties, primarily from the understanding that the crater off the coast of Yucatán Peninsula is what remains of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs," Larson says.
"This has always been a potential hazard. But now technology is at the point where we can actually find objects in the sky in an efficient way."
His staff is small: eight full-time employees and two part-timers, a modest number for a group that’s essentially in charge of patrolling the skies for Earth-ending surprises. Larson, in particular, speaks in a laid-back tone that seems unnervingly out of place, especially when he employs phrases like “devastating impact” or “society at stake.”

A 0.7-meter angle Schmidt survey telescope, used by Larson's team at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Ariz.
Image: Stephen Larson
Each night, one of Larson’s observers selects a region of the sky to survey, looking for the clearest sections based on clouds and other weather conditions. When he finds a desirable location, the observer chooses the brightest star, nicknamed the “catalogue reference star,” as a center point of reference.
Over the course of 10 minutes, the observer takes four or five still images centered around the reference star, then runs them through a special software that filters out any objects previously recorded. The computer looks for objects that change locations in a straight line throughout the photo series: “It has to be moving the same way, the same direction, to be considered an asteroid,” Larson says.
Images that fit the bill are flagged and sent back to the observer, who gives final confirmation and then checks for NEOs — the best indication being fast-moving objects, as they’re likely closer to the Earth’s surface.
The Catalina Sky Survey sends the results to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Cambridge, Mass., at the end of each night. There, the staff uses software that generates an orbit based on the data from Larson’s team. Using a complex system of calculations, they’re able to predict orbits and determine years in advance — sometimes hundreds of years — if a rock is on a potential collision course with Earth. Every finding is saved and documented, both digitally and on DVD, and posted on the group’s website.
“The calculations we use — they’re pretty advanced,” Tim Spahr, director of MPC, says with a laugh. “We receive these distances and velocities, then use them to estimate an orbit. We’ve compressed the equations into our software, so all I really have to do is push a button with a bunch of code and wait for it to bark something out at me.”
On the day of the Chelyabinsk strike, the team was actually eyeing a different asteroid. A year prior, an observatory in Granada, Spain, had located a 30-meter-wide object called ”367943 Duende” moving along a suspicious orbit closing in on Earth. After a few days of calculations, MPC determined it would pass by the planet safely.
A year went by and, when the time came, it flew by as planned. Anyone still nervous about it breathed a sigh of relief. Sixteen hours later, when the Chelyabinsk meteor struck Russia without warning, Duende was as good as forgotten.
Larson’s Catalina program began with $4 million per year of NASA funding. At the time, the team searched for asteroids 1 kilometer around and larger, a rock size referred to as an “Earth killer,” thought to have the ability to wipe out entire populations and drastically affect the food chain upon impact.

An artist's interpretation of a narrow asteroid belt orbiting a star
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Objects even 100 meters around could destroy an entire city,” Larson says. “But those that are 1 kilometer and larger ... those would have global consequences.”
Currently, NASA claims to have catalogued more than 90% of the asteroids and comets larger than 1 kilometer (or 0.6 miles) across, most of which live in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. If any were on-course for Earth, they’d know.
The really small asteroids — ones that enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day and burn into dust by the time they reach the surface — are almost never noticed, let alone detected.
Chelyabinsk-sized objects fall somewhere in the middle. They’re big enough to do damage but still small enough to slide under the radar.
Location plays a factor, too. The Chelyabinsk asteroid came from the direction of the sun, which blinded any telescopes that might have otherwise detected it.
In 2005, MPC revised its goal, electing to target objects 140 meters around and larger. Now, the targets are even broader, in part because so many large asteroids have already been discovered, he says, but also because his team has realized the possibility for destruction if smaller rocks, Chelyabinsk-sized and similar, hit the planet without warning.
In 2008, an observer detected a four-meter asteroid named “TC3” hurtling near Earth’s atmosphere. Larson’s team sent the observation to MPC.
Luckily, the rock entered the atmosphere and exploded above a desolate region of the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan (now North Sudan), as predicted.
The rock was too small to have caused much significant damage, Larson says, even if it had hit a more inhabited area. The explosion fizzled the asteroid into small, golf ball-sized chunks by the time it hit the surface. Still, a raining shower of rocks on, say, the crowded streets of Manhattan wouldn’t be pretty. Residents would have been notified to take cover.

"Early Wednesday morning (Jan. 1, 2014) ... the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Ariz., collected a single track of observations with an immediate follow-up on what was possibly a very small asteroid — 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) in size — on a potential impact trajectory with Earth."
Larson says the most concerning detail about TC3 was actually the explosion. Like Chelyabinsk, TC3’s fireball was noticeable from the ground. Had it exploded over a region of conflict — near the border of Pakistan and India, for example — it could have been wrongly perceived as an attack.
“If it happens over the wrong area, there’d be big problems,” Larson says. “These small impacts, like Chelyabinsk, they don’t happen very often. But they can cause so much destruction when they do. We’d be irresponsible not to look for them."

An artist's interpretation of an asteroid breaking apart
Image: NASA
It was just after 9:20 a.m. in Chelyabinsk when the shock wave hit. The city, with a population of just over a million people, sits in the Ural Mountains region near the border of Europe and Asia. In the winter months, given its northern latitude, the sun rises late in the morning. On that day, Khaibrakhmanov remembers, the bang was almost in sync with the breaking of dawn.
From his balcony, he cursed the glass cuts in his feet and stared onto the street. Nearly every window, in his building and the adjacent ones, was shattered. A group of neighbors stood on the sidewalk below — some dressed in coats, scarves and wool caps; some still wearing pajamas — while others cautiously peeked their heads out their front doors and window frames. Everyone, he says, looked to the sky.

A zinc factory with a collapsed roof in Chelyabinsk on Feb. 16, 2013
Image: Laura Mills/Associated Press
Khaibrakhmanov (pronoucned hai-brah-man-of), 26, is a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at Chelyabinsk State University.
“After the shock of it all had settled, I remember thinking, ‘Maybe this was a meteor,’” he says. “But at the time, nobody where I was knew what had happened.”
He was sure of one thing: Despite the sun having barely risen, he was definitely awake. And he had questions.

An artist's interpretation of NASA's Dawn spacecraft and the asteroid Vesta
Image: NASA
“A lot of people think my job sounds like science fiction. And, yeah, I guess it kind of is.”
Ed Lu, a former astronaut who lived aboard the ISS for six months, is CEO and founder of the B612 Foundation, an asteroid-tracking group that, since 2012, has raised funds with the hope of building the world’s first orbiting telescope.
It’s an ambitious but necessary plan, Lu argues. While ground telescopes are good stepping stones, they’re just not covering all the areas that need to be monitored. Their primary weakness is visibility. In the case of Chelyabinsk, it was the sun’s rays that prohibited anyone — even Larson’s team — from seeing the rock before it had already entered the atmosphere. It’s those kind of rocks Lu hopes to catch.
The $250 million ship his team is designing, which they’re calling "The Sentinel," will be equipped with a high-powered scope and infrared lens. The idea is to send it on an orbit around the sun at a distance similar to that of Venus, meaning one round-trip would last approximately seven months. Having that vantage point will allow it to track NEOs from a closer proximity, with the sun at its back at all times.

Video: YouTube, California Academy of Science

"Asteroids are very faint. They're like pieces of black charcoal flying in a black sky," he says. "In order to really see them, you need to have a space-based eye like this that travels with the sun behind it."

Lu says the craft will be able to find 200,000 NEOs, both large and small, within its first year alone, far past the current ground telescope record of about 1,000 per year.

"There are millions of them out there. To find all of them, how we're currently operating, would take thousands of years. But most asteroids change orbits slightly every 100 years — so at that pace, we're never actually caught up."

An asteroid that we think is safe now, then, might be a threat for our great-great-great-grandkids. But there’s time to figure it out, he says — so long as we act soon.

The official launch isn’t slated until July 2018. Until then, Lu says the group will continue to raise funds and finalize the ship's design. Although Lu is a former employee of NASA, the project is being funded entirely by donors. It's the first deep space mission of its kind to be conducted in the private sector, he says. A spokesperson for the group declined to release how much money they’ve currently raised.

NEOCam has a mission similar to B612. This group, led by Amy Mainzer, Ph.D., was recently funded by NASA for technology development.

Its goal is also to build a space telescope, packed with an infrared lens and wide-field camera, that will orbit close to Earth — not Venus — and monitor the area for NEOs. If launched, it will carry out a four-year baseline survey to track down two-thirds of NEOs in the 140-meter-wide range. Additionally, it will use infrared imaging channels to measure NEOs’ composition and shapes.

"As NASA's Dawn spacecraft travels to its next destination, this mosaic synthesizes some of the best views the spacecraft had of the giant asteroid Vesta."

According to the group’s website, the project is making and testing new detectors for its ship that help “meet the rigorous requirements of spaceflight.” The team says it will repropose the project to NASA’s next call for Discovery proposals, hopefully by 2015.

"Finding these smaller-sized NEOs is absolutely critical to the future of the earth,” Lu says. “This is the only natural disaster we know how to prevent. Shame on us if we don’t do this.”

Image: Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images

Ultimately, if we do find an approaching rock with enough time to act, what do we do? The Hollywood notion of explosives (see: Armageddon) seems dangerous by most standards. Blowing something into smithereens without changing its course only means those smithereens will hit its target, instead of the big object — still just as, if not more, dangerous.

Other ideas propose nudging dangerous asteroids away from Earth. In 2005, Lu co-published a study on an asteroid-deflecting technique called "gravity phasing." The study hypothesized that a spacecraft be sent to an Earth-bound asteroid well ahead of its impact, hover above it and over time, the craft would pull the asteroid off its course using nothing more than the gravitational attraction between both bodies.

Larson says other proposals have talked about using nuclear explosives to alter the course of an asteroid. Instead of detonating a bomb on the surface, these would instead create an explosion off to the side, in hopes the blast would shoot the rock off its Earth-bound course.

In August 2013, NASA released details about a ”big bag” method, which would capture rocks using a giant bag attached to a spacecraft — sort of like catching a butterfly in a net. Details are pretty slim at the moment. According to the proposal, the cutting edge technology (the bag) is still in development, but the purpose of this mission is to capture a rock, pull it into orbit around the moon, then study its composition. In emergency situations, then, it probably wouldn’t be the best option.

Larson's team at MPC has requested $40 million in NASA funding for 2014, but they’re still waiting on a final decision from the board.

“The survey telescopes we’re currently using were originally designed for other things, but they’ve been monitored the best they can for NEO-tracking,” he says. “But stronger cameras, ones that are tailored with this sole purpose in mind, would allow us to view larger areas at a time. We just need more money to make that happen.”

He’s proposed new surveillance instruments in the southern hemisphere, as a way to keep an eye to the sky almost every hour of the day. There’s also talk of building NEO-tracking telescopes in Russia and France.

Nothing has been set in action just yet. Without the urgent knowledge of an approaching NEO — a larger one that, say, we’d have several years to act on — it's a lower priority stance compared to other missions, Larson says.

“Unless Congress can be convinced it’s worth really funding and investing in, we’re years out before something like a proper prevention method will really be considered,” he says.

Recent and Notable Meteors

But that’s not to say it isn’t being discussed at all. Just last week, Spahr met with the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to talk about a potential “International Asteroid Warning Network.” In short, the group would serve as a communication network across the world’s largest space programs. Members throughout various countries would act as liaisons between scientists and the public.

“This is still in it’s early stage. And I mean early, like infancy stage,” Spahr says.

Spahr emphasizes that it wouldn’t serve as an alert team. If there was an emergency — say, an asteroid was headed toward London, estimated to impact in 24 hours — it would still be up to the city to alert its residents and determine an evacuation plan. The warning network would just ensure all the needed information was delivered.

“If anything, this might help alter the public’s perception about NEOs, in a good way,” he says. “The more seriously people take them — or just the more people who are aware of them and the risk — the better.”

Image: Stephen Larson

Khaibrakhmanov was excited when he learned the explosion was, in fact, the result of a meteor. He walked through his neighborhood for 40 minutes, without an intact window pane in sight. By then, videos of the meteor, captured from dash cams and cellphones, had already gone viral.

Several shops in the city started selling souvenirs of the asteroid, including a specialty themed candy bar still available today. A sign outside one store now reads: “Nothing keeps your spirit up better than a meteor in the morning.” A memorial statue of the asteroid is said to be in the works, too.

"Ask anyone from Chelyabinsk and they’ll tell you a warning would have been nice," says Khaibrakhmanov.

Chelyabinsk may have slipped through our fingers, but that doesn’t mean future asteroids have to. Larson, for the most part, is remaining cool about it. He’s not trying to invoke fear by doing what he does, just awareness. Maybe a little appreciation for the universe, too.

"This can be a big problem. We don’t consider the next big impact as an if, but as a when,” he says. “Hopefully it will be well into the future.”

Hopefully.

Video: YouTube, California Academy of Science
"Asteroids are very faint. They're like pieces of black charcoal flying in a black sky," he says. "In order to really see them, you need to have a space-based eye like this that travels with the sun behind it."
Lu says the craft will be able to find 200,000 NEOs, both large and small, within its first year alone, far past the current ground telescope record of about 1,000 per year.
"There are millions of them out there. To find all of them, how we're currently operating, would take thousands of years. But most asteroids change orbits slightly every 100 years — so at that pace, we're never actually caught up."
An asteroid that we think is safe now, then, might be a threat for our great-great-great-grandkids. But there’s time to figure it out, he says — so long as we act soon.
The official launch isn’t slated until July 2018. Until then, Lu says the group will continue to raise funds and finalize the ship's design. Although Lu is a former employee of NASA, the project is being funded entirely by donors. It's the first deep space mission of its kind to be conducted in the private sector, he says. A spokesperson for the group declined to release how much money they’ve currently raised.
NEOCam has a mission similar to B612. This group, led by Amy Mainzer, Ph.D., was recently funded by NASA for technology development.
Its goal is also to build a space telescope, packed with an infrared lens and wide-field camera, that will orbit close to Earth — not Venus — and monitor the area for NEOs. If launched, it will carry out a four-year baseline survey to track down two-thirds of NEOs in the 140-meter-wide range. Additionally, it will use infrared imaging channels to measure NEOs’ composition and shapes.

"As NASA's Dawn spacecraft travels to its next destination, this mosaic synthesizes some of the best views the spacecraft had of the giant asteroid Vesta."
According to the group’s website, the project is making and testing new detectors for its ship that help “meet the rigorous requirements of spaceflight.” The team says it will repropose the project to NASA’s next call for Discovery proposals, hopefully by 2015.
"Finding these smaller-sized NEOs is absolutely critical to the future of the earth,” Lu says. “This is the only natural disaster we know how to prevent. Shame on us if we don’t do this.”

Dr. Ed Lu sits second from left at the National Security Affairs, U.S. Naval War College Subcommittee on Science and Space hearing on space threats risks/solutions, on March 20, 2013.
Image: Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images
Ultimately, if we do find an approaching rock with enough time to act, what do we do? The Hollywood notion of explosives (see: Armageddon) seems dangerous by most standards. Blowing something into smithereens without changing its course only means those smithereens will hit its target, instead of the big object — still just as, if not more, dangerous.
Other ideas propose nudging dangerous asteroids away from Earth. In 2005, Lu co-published a study on an asteroid-deflecting technique called "gravity phasing." The study hypothesized that a spacecraft be sent to an Earth-bound asteroid well ahead of its impact, hover above it and over time, the craft would pull the asteroid off its course using nothing more than the gravitational attraction between both bodies.
Larson says other proposals have talked about using nuclear explosives to alter the course of an asteroid. Instead of detonating a bomb on the surface, these would instead create an explosion off to the side, in hopes the blast would shoot the rock off its Earth-bound course.
In August 2013, NASA released details about a ”big bag” method, which would capture rocks using a giant bag attached to a spacecraft — sort of like catching a butterfly in a net. Details are pretty slim at the moment. According to the proposal, the cutting edge technology (the bag) is still in development, but the purpose of this mission is to capture a rock, pull it into orbit around the moon, then study its composition. In emergency situations, then, it probably wouldn’t be the best option.
Larson's team at MPC has requested $40 million in NASA funding for 2014, but they’re still waiting on a final decision from the board.
“The survey telescopes we’re currently using were originally designed for other things, but they’ve been monitored the best they can for NEO-tracking,” he says. “But stronger cameras, ones that are tailored with this sole purpose in mind, would allow us to view larger areas at a time. We just need more money to make that happen.”
He’s proposed new surveillance instruments in the southern hemisphere, as a way to keep an eye to the sky almost every hour of the day. There’s also talk of building NEO-tracking telescopes in Russia and France.
Nothing has been set in action just yet. Without the urgent knowledge of an approaching NEO — a larger one that, say, we’d have several years to act on — it's a lower priority stance compared to other missions, Larson says.
“Unless Congress can be convinced it’s worth really funding and investing in, we’re years out before something like a proper prevention method will really be considered,” he says.

But that’s not to say it isn’t being discussed at all. Just last week, Spahr met with the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to talk about a potential “International Asteroid Warning Network.” In short, the group would serve as a communication network across the world’s largest space programs. Members throughout various countries would act as liaisons between scientists and the public.
“This is still in it’s early stage. And I mean early, like infancy stage,” Spahr says.
Spahr emphasizes that it wouldn’t serve as an alert team. If there was an emergency — say, an asteroid was headed toward London, estimated to impact in 24 hours — it would still be up to the city to alert its residents and determine an evacuation plan. The warning network would just ensure all the needed information was delivered.
“If anything, this might help alter the public’s perception about NEOs, in a good way,” he says. “The more seriously people take them — or just the more people who are aware of them and the risk — the better.”

A 1.5-meter survey telescope on Mount Lemmon, near Tucson, Ariz.
Image: Stephen Larson
Khaibrakhmanov was excited when he learned the explosion was, in fact, the result of a meteor. He walked through his neighborhood for 40 minutes, without an intact window pane in sight. By then, videos of the meteor, captured from dash cams and cellphones, had already gone viral.
Several shops in the city started selling souvenirs of the asteroid, including a specialty themed candy bar still available today. A sign outside one store now reads: “Nothing keeps your spirit up better than a meteor in the morning.” A memorial statue of the asteroid is said to be in the works, too.
"Ask anyone from Chelyabinsk and they’ll tell you a warning would have been nice," says Khaibrakhmanov.
Chelyabinsk may have slipped through our fingers, but that doesn’t mean future asteroids have to. Larson, for the most part, is remaining cool about it. He’s not trying to invoke fear by doing what he does, just awareness. Maybe a little appreciation for the universe, too.
"This can be a big problem. We don’t consider the next big impact as an if, but as a when,” he says. “Hopefully it will be well into the future.”
Hopefully.