So the reports of the Russian meteor explosion were not exaggerating: the meteor that hit the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk on Friday was even bigger than originally suspected, NASA said Saturday. The meteor is the largest to hit earth since the asteroid explosion in Tunguska in 1908, which flattened trees over 820 miles of the Siberian forest. NASA officials said the asteroid was 50 feet wide and 7,000 ton and zoomed toward space at a velocity of 40,000 miles per hour—and was momentarily brighter than the sun. On Saturday, thousands of Russian emergency workers cleared the damage from the meteor, with divers focusing on a lake near Chelyabinsk where a hole several feet wide had opened up—but no fragments had been recovered yet.
