Above Earth last year, a meteor 10x stronger than the Hiroshima bomb blew apart. It’s said to be the second largest explosion of its kind.
The blast took place at 3:30am EST (11:50pm GMT) on December 18th, 16 miles (25.6 kilometres) above Earth’s surface off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, over the Bering Sea, according to reports. The rock measured ten meters (30 feet) wide, weighed above 1,500 tons and supplied the equivalent energy of 173 kilotons of TNT.
Military satellites detected the meteor at the time and sent the data to NASA, however the detonation had gone comparatively unrecognized by most. Though, Peter Brown, a University of Western Ontario planetary astronomer, actually did, and he shared the news via Twitter with his followers.
Kelly Fast, the near-Earth objects observations program manager at NASA, explained: “That was 40 percent the energy release of Chelyabinsk, but it was over the Bering Sea so it didn’t have the same type of effect or show up in the news. That’s another thing we have in our defense – there’s plenty of water on the planet.”
Lindley Johnson, Nasa’s planetary defense officer, suggested a fireball this massive is only anticipated to impinge on the Earth 2 or 3 times every 100 years.
Meteors like this are dubbed as ‘problems without passports’ because they have the prospective to affect entire regions if they clash with Earth. Though, it will take them another 3 decades to meet their 90% aim, according to scientists’ estimates.
In recent years, Chelyabinsk was the largest explosion of its sort recorded. Gauging 656ft wide, the planetoid was named 2011 EO40 and 6 years ago traveled into Earth’s atmosphere at a whopping 41,600mph, issuing 30 times more energy than diagnosed at Hiroshima.
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