An "invisible" meteorite that exploded over the Bering Sea captured by a camera

A meteor that snuck past the world's telescopes and exploded over the Bering Sea was photographed after all.

Two NASA Terra satellite instruments captured images of the 18 December 2018 fireball explosion. The meteor trace is visible in the upper part of the photo in the form of a shadow dark and streaked at the top of the clouds. An orange cloud of overheated air created by the explosion is in the lower right corner of the image.

NASA scientists estimate that the meteor had a diameter of 10 meters and weighed 1,360 tons (1,360 tons). It blew into the atmosphere at a speed of 115,200 km / h (71,582 mph) and exploded 25 kilometers above the surface of the ocean. It exploded with the power of 173 kilotons of TNT, ten times more than the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima in 1945. [Top 10 Greatest Explosions Ever]

Small but powerful

Despite this power, the meteor was smaller than the space rocks on which NASA concentrates its sky-scanning resources. The space agency monitors the presence of objects near the Earth of a size greater than 140 meters, which would erase an entire US state.

The small size and remoteness of the Bering Sea explains why this image of the asteroid comes only after the fact. It was captured by Terra's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-Radiometer (MODIS) and its Multi-angle Imaging Spectro-Reflector (MISR).

According to NASA, the fireball was the largest observed since 2013, but it did not pose a threat given the height of the explosion and the fact that the explosion occurred in an unpopulated area. NASA scientist Kelly Fast, who is in charge of the Near Earth Observations program, announced the blast last week at a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.

Historical fireballs

Space rocks are a rare danger on Earth, but meteors are sometimes problematic. The most spectacular fireball of recent memory is the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor, which crossed Russia and exploded about 29.7 km above the ground. [See Images of the Russian Meteor Explosion]

This meteor was about 20 meters in diameter, twice the size of the fireball of the Bering Sea. It exploded with an explosion equivalent to 400 to 500 kilotons of TNT, and the shock wave injured more than 1,000 people, of whom 112 were serious enough to be admitted to hospital. Most were injured by the broken glass by the blast, although some felt eye pain and ultraviolet burns caused by intense light and heat from the blast.

The Chelyabinsk meteor is the largest that has penetrated into the atmosphere since the meteor that caused the Tunguska event in 1908. On June 30 this year, a meteor exploded about 10 km above eastern Siberia, destroying hundreds of square kilometers of forest. . The size of the Tunguska meteor is not clear, but the lowest estimates place it at three times the size of the Chelyabinsk meteor.

Originally published on Science live.