Last December, U.S. military satellites detected a massive meteor blast over the Bering Sea, off Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, BBC News reports. The Air Force then alerted NASA, which confirmed that it was a meteor. NASA’s planetary defense officer, Lindley Johnson, told the BBC the fireball from the exploding space rock had 10 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. He added that it exploded over an area “not too far from routes used by commercial planes flying between North America and Asia.” He said researchers had since checked with airlines active in the area to see if they noted any anomalies in the sky. “The latest event over the Bering Sea shows that larger objects can collide with us without warning, underlining the need for enhanced monitoring,” the BBC reports. “A more robust network would be dependent not only on ground telescopes, but space-based observatories also.”
