From NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. Analysis of the meteor that flew in over Russia tells a surprising tale. Shortly after dawn on Feb. 15, 2013, a bolide measuring 18 meters across and weighing 11,000 metric tons, screamed into Earth’s atmosphere at 18.6 kilometers per second. Burning from the friction with Earth’s thin air, the space rock exploded 23.3 kilometers above Chelyabinsk, Russia.

The event led to the formation of a new dust belt in Earth’s stratosphere. Scientists used data from the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite along with the GEOS-5 computational atmospheric model to achieve the first space-based observation the long-term evolution of a bolide plume.