Using an eclectic mix of crowd-sourced video, information from Google Earth and data from nuclear test-ban sensors, scientists have gotten a much more accurate picture of the small asteroid that exploded near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk last month.

But what is most clear is that while Chelyabinsk did not exactly dodge a bullet on Feb. 15, the city was fortunate to be only grazed by it. “The people of Chelyabinsk were very lucky,” Edward Lu, a former astronaut who now leads the B612 Foundation, a private initiative to detect similar asteroids, said at a Congressional hearing last week about the space threats.

The Russian meteor — which, according to the latest estimates, was about 60 feet in diameter and came in undetected at roughly 42,000 miles an hour — was almost 15 miles high when it blew apart. There were no deaths, and most of the 1,500 injuries were from glass as windows shattered when a shock wave hit the city 88 seconds later.

“If it had detonated closer to the ground, it would have been worse,” said Margaret Campbell-Brown, a member of a team of researchers at the University of Western Ontario who have analyzed the meteor’s orbit and characteristics of the blast. It also helped that the meteor was a stony one — what scientists call an ordinary chondrite — and not a rarer iron-nickel one, in which case it might have reached the ground before exploding.