NASA revealed that a meteor exploded over Earth last year and the blast was estimated to be 10 times bigger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The meteor exploded near Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula over the Bering Sea on December 18 last year.
According to NASA, the meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere at a steep angle of around seven degress at a speed of about 71,582 mph or 21km per second and exploded. The explosion was detected by military satellites over the area which tracked the blast to around 25 km above the ground. Its impact energy was around 173 kilotonnes of TNT.
NASA said that though the meteor didn't reach the ground, the explosion was estimated to be more powerful than the atomic bomb that detonated over the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 during World War II.
The Earth is regularly pelted by comets and asteroids but it is rare to have objects this big to approach the planet. The real danger, NASA says, comes from near-Earth objects (NEOs) that have a diameter of more than 460 ft.
Although NASA added that explosion such as these occur only once every 100 years or so, it should be noted that this blast comes only six years after the Chelyabinsk meteor incident, which injured over 1,000 people and caused widespread damage over the region.
An asteroid expert at NASA said that the latest meteor only had 40 per cent of the energy release as that of Chelyabinsk and it exploded over the Bering Sea, which is why it didn't cause a lot of buzz.
