Anyone else catch this? Is this just a bad translation and they mean to say that an air defense unit tracked the meteorite on radar?
I wouldn't think any air defense system would be capable of actually intercepting a meteorite, but perhaps I'm wrong. Still doesn't seem like anything intercepted it from the videos.
It's not quite like taking out a satellite in low Earth orbit in that there's plenty of information on its orbit, trajectory, tumbling characteristics, approximate mass etc... It would be very, very, very hard to intercept a meteorite without a lot of information before it even got close to Earth.
The report of a missile salvo taking it out is very suspect IMO. Without more information, it's hard to tell.
It is plausible that the Russians launched an interceptor just to be safe. If it is a meteor, it neither hurts nor helps. If it is a man-made structure, it will do some real damage to it. Either way they can always argue "better safe than sorry".
It may be hot enough for infrared seekers, but it's no jet. Jets are fragile by comparison so, unless they had purely kinetic weapons... but that's still speculation at this point. We still don't know what the Russians did or if they did anything at all.
I doubt they even knew this specific meteor would enter the atmosphere. It's already hard enough detecting much bigger rocks in Earth-crossing orbits.
Modern terminal guidance systems are all imaging based. Or at least the US ones have been for a couple decades; I imagine the Russians are using something at least vaguely similar.
Basically, the missiles latch onto the target visually and are capable of recognizing their target from the details of its appearance (in an air defense context, not just "an airplane" but "that specific airplane"). It is why, contra Hollywood, modern terminal guidance systems are nigh impossible to spoof. The missile knows what the airplane looks like and can read the tail number off your craft, so as long as it can locate it (even if it temporarily loses sight), it is likely to hit unless the motor runs out of gas. Heat has little to do with it, though the imagers often work in broad spectrum infrared.
Lots of smaller, impacters with kiloton-class impact energies are never discovered or discovered at the very last minute. This looks like a pretty small rock in terms of damage done so it could easily have been missed by sky surveys.
If you mean the middle, that's most definitely the aftermath of the meteorite itself. You can see this in the other videos.
Is this true? Reentry speed of an ICBM is something like 5 km/s. Entry speed of a meteor is a minimum of 11 km/s, and more like 25 km/s if this object wasn't in an Earth-like orbit to begin with. Missile interceptors travel much slower than either, and they have a tough time hitting ICBMs from what I understand.
So it's safe to conclude the military was not involved here.
Interestingly, Russia does have an active ABM system. The old ABM-treaty allowed both the US and the USSR to have one ABM site active for each country, the US shut theirs down fairly quickly but the Soviets maintained and later upgraded theirs, protecting Moscow, and Russia has kept it. It's a nuclear warhead based system, it would be interesting to see what the hell would have happened if the same event happened over Moscow instead of Chelyabinsk.
The short range missile in the S-400 can reach mach 12 and at least one source [1] seems to indicate that a meteorite at 15-20km altitude would be traveling 4500-9000mph (roughly mach 6-12) and of course they wouldn't be likely to be in a complete 'chasing' orientation.
I also wouldn't think a meteorite would be that hard to track with radar once you have an initial direction on it, depending on its composition.
A missile salvo reportedly blew the meteorite to pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.