This impact might have separated the Chelyabinsk asteroid from its parent body and delivered it to the Earth,” lead researcher Shin Ozawa, with the University of Tohoku in Japan, wrote in a paper published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.The discovery is expected to give scientists more insight into how an asteroid may end up on a collision course with Earth. Scientists suspect the collision happened about 290 million years ago.Most of the 20-metre-wide asteroid that blazed over Chelyabinsk in south-western Siberia on February 15 last year was incinerated in a bright fireball, the result of frictional heating as it dropped through the atmosphere at 67,600 kilometres per hour. But many small fragments survived.The asteroid was traveling almost 60 times the speed of sound and exploded about 30 kilometres above ground with a force nearly 30 times as powerful as the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 in World War II.
