Silver Twenty Grams 2013 Chelyabinsk Meteorite, Coin from Cook Islands - detailed information

The Cook Islands, a sovereign state in free association with New Zealand, uses two official legal tender currencies. The New Zealand Dollar circulates in parallel with the local Cook Islands Dollar; at the same time, the government also authorises many legal tender coins in the Cook Islands Dollar currency for collector's purposes.

Collector coins are dedicated to historical or general popular culture themes not related to the country itself. Many of them are in bullion sizes based on the troy ounce, but some are "metric", like twenty grams (20g) of silver.

This coin featuring the Chelyabinsk Meteorite is part of the Meteorite Impacts collection which is issued in a number of different countries; all coins in it have an embedded original piece of the specific meteorite.

The Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over the southern Ural region in Russia on 15 February 2013 at about 09:20 YEKT (03:20 UTC). It was caused by an approximately 18 m diameter, 9,100-tonne near-Earth asteroid that entered the atmosphere at a shallow 18.3 ± 0.4 degree angle with a speed relative to Earth of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second. The light from the meteor was briefly brighter than the Sun, visible as far as 100 km away. It was observed in a wide area of the region and in neighbouring republics. Some eyewitnesses also reported feeling intense heat from the fireball.

The object exploded in a meteor air burst over Chelyabinsk Oblast, at a height of about 29.7 k. The explosion generated a bright flash, producing a hot cloud of dust and gas that penetrated to 26.2 km, and many surviving small fragmentary meteorites. Most of the object's energy was absorbed by the atmosphere, creating a large shock wave. The asteroid had a total kinetic energy before atmospheric impact equivalent to the blast yield of 400-500 kilotons of TNT, estimated from infrasound and seismic measurements. This was 26 to 33 times as much energy as that released from the atomic bomb detonated at Hiroshima.