[gatagato]

Equivalent to 5 TONNES of TNT going off, says NASA.

Vid Sensational news today from the Moon, as skywatchers say a huge explosion - as bright as a star, and visible from Earth with the naked eye - has been seen on the lunar surface.

"It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," splutters Bill Cooke, a top NASA boffin. According to NASA, the mighty blast briefly "glowed like a 4th magnitude star ... the explosion packed as much punch as 5 tons of TNT". For comparison that's twice as much explosive as one would find in a US Air Force nuclear-bunker-busting MOP superbomb.

Rather than a crashing alien spaceship, or perhaps the launch flare of one taking off, Cooke and his colleagues believe that the massive moon bomb blast has a relatively prosaic explanation: an unusually violent meteor strike. NASA calculations indicate that a meteoroid probably around 0.4 metres across and massing 40kg-odd barrelled into the lunar regolith going at around 56 thousand mph.

Despite the violence and brightness of the resulting cataclysm, nobody noticed it at the time, or if they did they didn't tell NASA. Though the space boulder struck the moon on March 17, the agency's boffins have only just realised it happened, while going through digital imagery recorded by automatic monitoring cameras attached to telescopes trained on the Moon.

Ron Suggs, analyst at the Marshall Space Flight Center, was the first to notice the impact.

"It jumped right out at me, it was so bright," he says.

NASA now plans to fly its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter probe craft, in orbit above the moon, over the impact site to see just what size of crater the meteoroid left. Assuming that Cooke and Suggs are right and no aliens, Tibetans, escaped WWII Nazis etc were involved, anyway.

There's more on the lunar space boulder bomb blast cataclysm coolness from NASA here.

[Faline]

Cool but i was expecting something bigger

[kellyhound]

cool. can't wait for the lunar orbiter to take pics of the impact crater

[Viking64]

Originally Posted by Kelly ↗

Cool but i was expecting something bigger

The last time we Skyped you said the same exact thing to me.

[Emperor Wang]

Originally Posted by Kelly ↗

Cool but i was expecting something bigger

Typical woman

[gatagato]

Originally Posted by kellyhound ↗

cool. can't wait for the lunar orbiter to take pics of the impact crater

Here is a "before-after" animation

More recently in the news, a much smaller object was seen to impact the Moon on 17 March 2013. A team of Marshall Space Flight Center scientists photographed this bright flash (and many others), and then computed latitude and longitude coordinates.

The LROC team targets the coordinates of flashes for future observations in hopes of finding a newly formed crater. If an LROC NAC image of the impact area was acquired before the event, it is very likely that the crater can be found by comparing before and after images. If no pre-existing image exists then the task becomes nearly impossible because there are so many small, young impact craters on the Moon! So far the LROC team has found one crater associated with Marshall impact flash reports, certainly more will follow. However, the search is not limited to Marshall targets - in fact the LROC team has found over seventy potential new impact craters that formed since LRO went into orbit.
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index....h-of-Time.html

[Pyramid_Head]

Cool video, but like Kelly said, I was expected something bigger.

[AmericanIllusions]

Now if we can only get out there to take a look at it.

[Ozzman]

I hope it didn't damage the moon landing sites.