Oleg Malkov, an aerospace scientist at Moscow State University, told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper that the meteorite went undetected by space scanners, likely because it was coming from the direction of the Sun. "We can only register stones coming from the direction of the night sky," he explained. Malkov confirmed that the meteor shower in the Urals was not connected to the 2012DA14 asteroid that will approach Earth in a few hours.