A meteor hurtling toward Earth exploded over the northeastern United States on Saturday, local time, NASA said.<\/p>\n
It set off booms that echoed over the region with a blast equivalent to 300 tonnes of TNT.<\/p>\n
The fireball broke up over northeastern Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire at 2:06pm (1806 GMT), the US space agency\u2019s deputy news chief Jennifer Dooren told AFP.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis fireball was not associated with any currently active meteor shower, but it was a natural object and not a re-entry of space debris or a satellite,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cThe energy released at break-up is estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tonnes of TNT, which accounts for the loud booms.\u201d <\/p>\n
The meteor was travelling at more than 120,000km\/h at an altitude of 64 kilometres when it broke apart, Dooren said.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Area residents were alarmed by the unexpected loud booms, with social media users reporting they were so powerful that houses were shaking.<\/p>\n
In 2013 a fireball streaked above Chelyabinsk, Russia. <\/p>\n
The house-sized space rock blew apart 22km above the ground, releasing a blast equivalent to 440,000 tonnes of TNT, NASA said.<\/p>\n
The explosion blew out windows over 518 square kilometres, injuring more than 1600 people, mostly due to broken glass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A meteor hurtling toward Earth exploded over the northeastern United States on Saturday, local time, NASA said. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[343709,2620,343715,64,63,343714,343712,343713,343325,343711,58650,128,212218,285,280205,8524,2614,343710],"class_list":["post-706524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-active-meteor-shower","tag-agence-france-presse","tag-area-residents","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-blast-equivalent","tag-deputy-news-chief","tag-house-sized-space-rock","tag-jennifer-dooren","tag-media-users-reporting","tag-new-hampshire","tag-science","tag-social-media-users","tag-space","tag-space-agency","tag-space-debris","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-video-tag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}