Russia wants to set up a system to block cosmic hazards

Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin said yesterday he supported the call for the establishment of a system capable of preventing threats from space outside the globe.

"Humanity has to create a system to detect and neutralize objects that are capable of inflicting earth," Rogozin wrote on Twitter on February 16, a day after a meteorite. In central Russia, nearly 1,200 people were injured and caused about 33 million USD of material damage.

Rogozin announced that he would submit to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev solutions to deal with future meteorites on February 18, RIA Novosti reported.

The power of a meteorite explosion in the sky of Russia on February 15 is equivalent to 20 times the atomic bomb that the US military dropped into the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.

Rusty Schweickart, a former astronaut who had flown with the Apollo Apollo spacecraft, urged governments to monitor the activities of objects closer to the earth more closely.

The US Aerospace Agency (NASA) identified meteorites that exploded in the Russian sky with a mass of about 10,000 tons before it came into contact with the earth's atmosphere.

According to data collected by NASA scientists, meteorites exploded in Russia about 15 meters in diameter. It exploded a few kilometers from Earth and released nearly 500 kiloton of energy, dozens of times the power of the atomic bomb that American planes dropped on Japan's Hiroshima city during World War II.

The Russian Interior Ministry confirmed that the impact of the meteorite explosion caused the roof and walls of a tin plant to collapse. According to the Chelyabinsk city government, about 3,000 houses and 300 schools in the city were partially damaged by the explosion. The total window area is broken up to 100,000m2. Due to broken windows, many people have direct contact with cold weather at -9 degrees Celsius.

Vladimir Puchkov, Minister of Emergency Situations, said that the total damage to assets in Chelyabinsk and Kopeysk - the two regions most affected by the consequences - was about 400 million rubles ($ 13.3 million). The head of the Yurevich region, Mikhail Yurevich, said the area's physical damage amounted to one billion rubles ($ 33.2 million).