Posted on 03/18/2019 8:51:47 AM PDT by BenLurkin
A huge fireball exploded in the Earth's atmosphere in December, according to Nasa.
The blast was the second largest of its kind in 30 years, and the biggest since the fireball over Chelyabinsk in Russia six years ago.
But it went largely unnoticed until now because it blew up over the Bering Sea, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. The space rock exploded with 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer at Nasa, told BBC News a fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years.
At about noon local time on 18 December, the asteroid barrelled through the atmosphere at a speed of 32km/s (20 miles per second) , on a steep trajectory of seven degrees.
Measuring several metres in size, the space rock exploded 25.6km above the Earth's surface, with an impact energy of 173 kilotons.
"That was 40% the energy release of Chelyabinsk, but it was over the Bering Sea so it didn't have the same type of effect or show up in the news," said Kelly Fast, near-Earth objects observations programme manager at Nasa.
Military satellites picked up the blast last year; Nasa was notified of the event by the US Air Force.
Dr Johnson said the fireball came in over an area not too far from routes used by commercial planes flying between North America and Asia. So researchers have been checking with airlines to see if there were any reported sightings of the event.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
gnip
gnip?.....................
“Gnip, Inc. was a social media API aggregation company. Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, it provided data from dozens of social media websites via a single API.”
I have no clue..
Backwards ping?
gnip is ping sdrawkcab
EMP or just explosion?
Wouldn’t out INTELSATs have caught it, and news been leaked before now?
Any thoughts?
Russian seems to attract more than its share of exploding space objects.
I thought it was ‘gulp’ misspelled..................
That could have been real bad...
maybe it was a cow farting
I wonder if anyone on a crab boats saw it?
Hmm?
Odd, isn’t it?
Maybe the Ural Mtns have ‘special properties’, yet Russia is a huge land mass.
Or it’s just a coincidence.
Who knows?
It is a pretty big land mass.
I know you think the odds are comparable to being able to see a needle in a haystack from 10 miles away, it apparently keeps happening anyway. :)
These are just the researched and confirmed impacts... There are a LOT that still have not been fully documented.
Hover over these and it gives the details of each. The U.S. probably shows more frequency because it has been researched a quite a bit more than other locations around the world.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Earth_Impact_Database_world_map.svg
And here is the impact data from South America alone...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_in_South_America
Yuuuuuuge.....
tracts of land.
LOL!
What
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