The meteorite that flew over Russia was conventionally called Okulovka

The meteorite that flew over the Novgorod and Tver regions on October 27 was given the provisional name Okulovka. This was announced on November 20 by Kirill Lorenz, Head of the Laboratory of Meteoritics and Cosmochemistry at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"We conditionally call Okulovka by the name of the locality where it was discovered. <...> All meteorites are named after their place of discovery if it is a sufficiently large locality," TASS quoted him as saying.

He explained that the celestial body was named after the nearest settlement in the area where it was found.

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Earlier, on November 11, Stas Korotky, scientific director of the Ka-Dar Observatory and the Astroverts Astrofarm, reported that a fragment of a meteorite that arrived on October 27 broke through the roof of a house in the village of Okulovka, Novgorod region. According to the astronomer, all the debris of the cosmic body fell in this region. The scattering zone of the fragments was 75 km by 3 km. The larger parts of the meteorite were found in the western part of the impact field, the smaller ones to the east.

On the same day, GEOHI RAS reported on the discovery of meteorite samples by specialists. Preliminary studies have shown that the meteorite most likely belongs to ordinary chondrites (stone meteorites) of the LL6 group.

On October 27, the Laboratory of Solar Astronomy at the IKI RAS reported that a space object taken over Moscow could be an asteroid. It was specified that the object's speed reached from 14 to 30 km/s, which is typical for asteroids. At the same time, the flight path presumably passed 350-700 km north of the capital.

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