What happened
Shortly before noon on February 12, 1947, a fireball brighter than the Sun flew over the Sikhote-Alin Mountains in the Russian Far East, leaving a smoke trail that lingered in the sky for several hours. The roar could be heard more than 300 km away. The iron meteoroid broke up in the atmosphere, and its fragments fell over an elliptical area measuring about 4 by 12 km, forming more than a hundred craters and pits – the largest about 26 meters across. An expedition from the USSR Academy of Sciences was sent to the site and collected thousands of specimens. The painter P. I. Medvedev, who saw the fireball, captured it in a painting, and a reproduction of it appeared in 1957 on a Soviet postage stamp marking the tenth anniversary of the fall.
Witnesses
Residents of Primorsky Krai, including the painter P. I. Medvedev; the area was studied by an expedition from the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Explanations and hypotheses
This is a well-documented fall of an iron meteorite: an object with an estimated mass of several tens of tons broke up at an altitude of a few kilometers. About 23 tons of fragments were collected, and the meteorite was classified as a type IIAB iron. The fall is of exceptional scientific importance because it made it possible to study how large masses of iron behave during their passage through the atmosphere.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
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