NASA scientists informed about the captured images of an 88-pound (40 kg) rock dashing into the lunar surface, creating a bright flash of light which was caused by an automated telescope monitoring the moon. Further it's been recorded that the explosion on March 17 was the biggest seen since NASA began watching the moon for meteoroid impacts about eight years ago and since there have been a record of more than 300 strikes.
Bill Cooke who is with NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in a statement that the explosion caused was in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything they have ever seen before. Therefore, a NASA satellite orbiting the moon is now on a hunt for the newly formed crater, which scientists assess could be as wide as 66 feet (20 meters). NASA expressed that the flash was so bright that anyone looking at the moon at the moment of impact could have seen it without a telescope.
Having the digital recordings reviewed by one of the program’s telescopes, scientists determined the space rock was about 1 foot (0.3 meters) in diameter, as well as traveling about 56,000 mph (90,123 kph) when it dashed into the moon and exploded with the force of five tons of TNT moreover cameras detected an unusually high number of meteors blasting through Earth’s atmosphere as well on the same night. Another fact that most meteors seems to burn up well before reaching the ground yet not always. An asteroid assessed to be about 66 feet (20 meters) in diameter exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, damaging buildings and shattering glass while also leaving more than 1,500 injured which was the largest object to strike Earth since 1908.
Cooke was known to have mentioned that they will be keeping an eye out for signs of a repeat performance next year when the Earth-moon system passes through the same region of space, added earlier while he wrote wrote in an email to Reuters that the Russian fireball was many orders of magnitude larger and possessed 100,000 times more energy than the lunar impact and he believes the lunar impact and the March 17 meteor shower on Earth are related and that the result of both bodies traveling together through a region of space scattered with small rocks and dust.
Content source: Gulf news and Reuters
Image source: Google -Meteorite explosion rocks the moon
(AW:Samrat Biswas)
