It started with a flash.

At a few minutes past 9:00, one crystalline morning last February, a burst of light brighter than 30 suns illuminated Chelyabinsk, Russia, a southern industrial city known mostly for making tractors. Thanks to smartphones, surveillance cameras, and Russian auto-dash cams, we have a voluminous record of what happened next.

As the glow faded, a fireball the size of a six-story building blazed across the northern sky. It hit the atmosphere going Mach 50, fueled by the energy of more than 20 Hiroshimas and trailing a dirty-white plume. In a cameraphone video from that morning, a few men stood in the snow gawping at the fireball above their heads.

“What do you think?” one guy asked, more curious than afraid. “Maybe it was a satellite? Sputnik?”

Then the shockwave hit. The cameraman screamed and the picture spun wildly as the earth shook beneath his feet. The blast knocked people to the ground and burned the skin off others. Car alarms blared for miles around. Closed-circuit video feeds showed windows blowing inward, walls collapsing, people huddling under desks. Flying debris cracked open a statue of Alexander Pushkin in a library. There were no deaths, somehow, but 1,500 were injured. Eight months later, researchers pulled a half-ton chunk of the asteroid out of a frozen lake more than 40 miles from the city.

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