Telescope catches the moment a 40kg rock hits the moon and creates a giant ball of light which could be seen from Earth
An telescope monitoring the moon has captured the moment a 40kg rock slammed into the lunar surface creating a bright flash of light.
The explosion on March 17 was the biggest seen since NASA began watching the moon for meteoroid impacts about eight years ago. So far, more than 300 strikes have been recorded.
'It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before,' Bill Cooke, with NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, said in a statement.
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The telescope captured the moment a 40kg rock slammed into the moon creating a bright flash (pictured)A NASA satellite orbiting the moon is now on a hunt for the newly formed crater, which scientists estimate could be as wide as 20 meters.
The flash was so bright that anyone looking at the moon at the moment of impact could have seen it without a telescope, NASA said.
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After reviewing digital recordings made by one of the program's telescopes, scientists determined the space rock was about 1ft (0.3 meters) in diameter, and traveling about 56,000 mph when it slammed into the moon and exploded with the force of five tons of TNT.
That same night, cameras detected an unusually high number of meteors blasting through Earth's atmosphere as well. Most meteors burn up well before reaching the ground.
NASA's lunar monitoring program has captured hundreds of meteoroid impacts on the moon. The brightest was detected on March 17 which is marked with a red squareBut not always. In February, an asteroid estimated to be about 66ft (20 meters) in diameter exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, damaging buildings and shattering glass, leaving more than 1,500 injured. It was the largest object to strike Earth since 1908.
'The Russian fireball was many orders of magnitude larger and possessed 100,000 times more energy,' than the lunar impact, Cooke said.
He believes the lunar impact and the March 17 meteor shower on Earth are related, the result of both bodies traveling together through a region of space sprinkled with small rocks and dust.
'We'll 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,' Cooke said.
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