Largest Fireball Since Chelyabinsk Falls Into The Ocean

A huge fireball crashed into the Atlantic earlier this month and went almost unseen as the event took place on February 6 at 14:00 UTC when a meteor exploded in the air 620 miles (1,000km) off the coast of Brazil.

It released energy equivalent to 13,000 tons of TNT, which is the same as the energy used in the first atomic weapon that leveled Hiroshima in 1945. This was the largest event of its type since the February 2013 fireball that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, leaving more than 1,600 people injured. That fireball measured 18 meters across and screamed into Earth's atmosphere at 41,600 mph. Much of the debris landed in a local lake called Chebarkul.

Ron Baalke, who works for Nasa, first tweeted the event after it appeared on the space agency’s Near-Earth Object Fireball page.  Nasa tracks around 12,992 near-Earth objects which have been discovered orbiting within our solar system close to our own orbit. It estimates around 1,607 are classified as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids. 

In September, Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa's Near-Earth Object office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, said: “There is no existing evidence that an asteroid or any other celestial object is on a trajectory that will impact Earth. In fact, not a single one of the known objects has any credible chance of hitting our planet over the next century”.