Bright Explosion on the Moon

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Bright Explosion on the Moon

By Tony Phillips
NASA
Friday, May 17, 2013

For the past 8 years, NASA astronomers have been
monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions caused by
meteoroids hitting the lunar surface. "Lunar meteor
showers" have turned out to be more common than anyone
expected, with hundreds of detectable impacts occurring
every year.

They've just seen the biggest explosion in the history of
the program.

"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small
boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill
Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It
exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything
we've ever seen before."

A new ScienceCast video describes the bright lunar
explosion of March 17, 2013.

Anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could
have seen the explosion--no telescope required. For about
one second, the impact site was glowing like a 4th
magnitude star.

Ron Suggs, an analyst at the Marshall Space Flight
Center, was the first to notice the impact in a digital
video recorded by one of the monitoring program's 14-inch
telescopes. "It jumped right out at me, it was so
bright," he recalls.

The 40 kg meteoroid measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide hit
the Moon traveling 56,000 mph. The resulting explosion1
packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT.

Continues at:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/16may_lunarimpact/

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

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