Butler U prof uses meteor as teaching tool

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) - Friday brought an up close meteor in the morning and a close encounter with an asteroid in the afternoon. 

It was the perfect day for an astronomy class at Butler University where the events were used as an important teaching tool. 

The class met only a few hours after the meteor was video taped .
  
There was no need for animation, thanks to surveillance video and cell phones. Dr. Brian Murphy was able to show his students video of the real thing.

"It's actually just a meteorite about the size of an SUV that entered the atmosphere this morning," he says to his students as he shows them video of the meteor in the sky above Siberia. 

Because there was so much video , Murphy was able to show it to his class and explain what happened.

The video clearly shows the path of the meteor and the moment it exploded, an estimated 10 miles above the earth. 

Dr. Murphy says the meteor was likely a mass of rock and/or metal moving at 20,000 – 30,000 miles per hour. 

"You see it entering. You see it brightening as it heats up. And then you see a bright flash and a couple more.  That's when it's breaking up and having the explosions," he says. 

• PHOTOS | View photos of the meteor that struck Russia

Dr. Murphy says the estimated 1,000 injuries were caused by blown out windows and flying debris from the explosion above the earth and the sonic boom afterward. 

"It's a supersonic basically object in the atmosphere. That's the sonic boom you hear after basically the shockwave reaches the Earth’s surface," says Dr. Murphy.

Hours later, Asteroid 2012 D-A-14 made a record-close pass by Earth 

The asteroid, with a mass 30,000 times bigger than the meteor and measuring about half a football field in length, came about 17,100 miles from our planet's surface.  Good that it passed earth says Dr. Murphy and didn't enter our atmosphere.

"Now if that came into the atmosphere, let’s say over Indianapolis, it would be an airburst. Also, maybe a few miles off the surface, equivalent to a hydrogen bomb, it would level pretty much everything in Marion County," he says. 

Dr. Murphy says you'll have a chance to see the asteroid that missed us, again.  It should pass by Earth in about 30 years. 

Small meteors that hit the Earth – meteorites is what they are called then – happen 5 to 10 times a year.

These usually cause no damage and often go unnoticed. 

Larger ones like the one in Russia happen every 5 years or so. Most of those fall in uninhabited areas so you don't hear about them and they don't cause any injuries.