YEKATERINBURG. Feb 14 (Interfax) - The bolide, which fell in Russia's Chelyabinsk region a year ago, has confirmed the necessity of creating a protection system from asteroids and comets, head of the theoretical physics department of the Chelyabinsk State University, Alexander Dudorov, said.
"The main issue is that astronomers can not see such objects in advance. Special high penetration wide-angle cameras and systems for orbit trajectory changes are needed. This is very-very expensive. But I think that people have started to realize now that this is necessary," Dudorov said at a news conference in Yekaterinburg on Thursday.
If the Chelyabinsk meteorite would have come in at a slightly different angle the damage would have been much greater, Dudorov said.
The meteorite is a "serious wake-up call," lecturer of the physics technical university of the Ural federal University, members of the Russian Academy of Sciences meteorite committee, member of the international meteorite society, Viktor Grokhovsky, said.
"We are under threat, a bigger [astronomical] body can fall," he said.
A body resembling the Chelyabinsk meteorite was registered close to the Earth in January 2014, Grokhovsky said. "It fell in the Atlantic," he said.
The fall of the Chelyabinsk meteorite made scientists doubt existing estimates of how often meteorites fall, lecturer of the theoretical physics department of the Chelyabinsk State University, Sergei Zamozdra, said.
"Estimates exists that bodies of such size, about 20 meters, fall once every 100 years. Now a guess emerges that such events occur more frequently. Probably five times a hundred years," Zamozdra said.
On February 15, 2013, a meteorite exploded in the sky above Chelyabinsk. The explosion knocked out windows in houses, destroyed roofs of residential, industrial and social buildings. Over 1,600 people were injured and the total damage amounted to about one billion rubles.
On October 16 the largest fragment of the meteorite of around 600 kg was lifted from the bottom of the Chebarkul Lake. It is being exhibited in the Chelyabinsk regional natural history museum.