That Celestial rock had been zooming along at 40,000 mph for thousands of years when it exploded over Russia on Friday — and that’s when it really picked up speed.
The first big meteorite of the media age rocketed through the consciousness of its target planet at the speed of Twitter. A rare event in a remote place went viral, thanks to the ubiquitous dashboard cameras of bad Russian drivers. And it instantly grabbed the attention of an electronic age that thought it was beyond being stunned by a bolt from space.
On Saturday, one day and 11 time zones away from the blast, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History‘s meteorite collection was a magnet for the newly fascinated. A volunteer at the information desk said he’d been directing visitors to the collection all morning. Knots of them gathered in front of the gnarled chunks that have previously peppered the Earth, comparing their iron reality to the arresting images from Russia.
“Oh, man — I’ve watched the videos about a hundred times,” said Jon Lee, a musician who was looking at the white-hot flash once more on his smartphone. “I can’t get over the sound it made.”
He stood before one of the collection’s prized specimens, the dishwasher-size Goose Lake meteorite that slammed long ago into an unpeopled California. “I don’t want that thing falling on my head.”
Meteorite is trending now
On an earlier Earth, it would have taken months for reports of even a massive meteoric strike to circle the globe. In 1908, when a mega-meteoroid flattened a swath of forest in central Russia, 
eyewitness accounts spread at the stately pace of steamships and scholarship. In 1992, it was thought remarkable that when the “Peekskill Fireball” streaked across the Mid-Atlantic sky on a fall Friday, glimpses were caught by 14 video cameras, most of them held by high school football fans.
This time, thanks to the unblinking phone, security and dashboard cameras that were ever-present even in the Ural Mountains, the whole world got to be a same-day witness to the fire in the sky. What used to emerge over time as a public phenomenon was absorbed, digested and discussed within hours.
By Saturday, more than 200 YouTube videos of the Friday explosion had logged millions of views, #meteorite was trending on Twitter and scientists had already held Web seminars on “the Chelyabinsk Event.” Conspiracy theories (It was an American weapon! It was a UFO!) were well developed in the kookier corners of the Internet. And schools had already incorporated Chelyabinsk into the curriculum.
“They had us watch it” on the Fox News website, said Jason Pennypacker, whose teachers interrupted his middle school science class in New Egypt, N.J., to bring students some instant astronomical history. “It was so cool.”
[readon1 url="http://www.voxxi.com/meteorite-impacts-go-global/#ixzz2LAvBYzCQ
"]Source:www.voxxi.com[/readon1]
