Meteor ‘fireball’ is one of largest ever seen

NASA released images of a meteor exploding over the Bering Sea in December in what was the largest such event recorded since 2013.

The images of the “fireball,” a term used by NASA to describe “exceptionally bright meteors that are spectacular enough to to be seen over a very wide area,” were captured Dec. 18 using instruments on the Terra satellite, the agency said.

The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer captured an image sequence of the meteor a few minutes after the event, and the Moderate Resolution Imaging SpectroRadiometer captured a color image of remnants of the meteor’s passage, NASA said.

Last week, NASA revealed that the explosion unleashed energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT, more than 10 times the energy generated by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

“An event like this might occur two to three times a century,” Lindley Johnson, a planetary defense officer at NASA, told USA TODAY last week.

NASA said that because of the altitude of the meteor and the remote area, the event did not pose a threat to anyone on the ground.

The last similar “fireball” event was in 2013, when a meteor exploded in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region and was captured on video by security and dashboard cameras. Johnson said that meteor generated energy equal to 440 kilotons of TNT.

The meteor that exploded over the Bering Sea in December unleashed energy equivalent to 173 kilotons of TNT, NASA says. NASA/JPL