A fireball on the Bering Sea | A weather …

NASA announced that a large meteorite had entered the Earth's atmosphere in December, causing an explosion ten times more powerful than the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima (Japan) in 1945. The epidemic, which was detected by US military satellites., took place over the Bering Sea, off the Kamchatka Peninsula, a remote region of Russia.

According to NASA, this explosion was the second most powerful of its kind in the last 30 years and the largest meteorite to reach the Earth's atmosphere from which it hit Chelyabinsk (Russia) in 2013.

The asteroid that struck the Bering Sea in December went through the atmosphere at a speed of 32 kilometers per second, following a seven-degree course. The fireball has crossed an area "not very far" from the routes used by commercial aircraft flying between North America and Asia. The meteorite exploded about 25.6 km above the surface of the Earth, with an impact energy of 173 kilotons, according to data from the space agency.

Lindley Johnson, the NASA's global defense officer, explained that such an explosion only occurred two or three times a hundred years ago.

In 2005, Congress asked NASA to identify by 2020 90% of asteroids close to Earth of a height of 140 meters or more. Space rocks of this size have been called "problems without pbadports" because they should affect whole regions if they collide with the Earth.