NASA Reveals March Lunar Explosion

NASA made public on Friday the fact that a sizable meteoroid impact on the lunar surface occurred on March 17,2013.Detected by analyst Ron Suggs of the Marshall Space Flight Center with video from a 14-inch telescope,the flash was 10 times greater than anything seen before in the eight years of the lunar impacts monitoring program.
The impact took place in the Mare Imbrium area and had a brightness as of a fourth magnitude star.The meteoroid was traveling at a speed of 56,000 miles an hour when it struck the moon.
The monitoring program has ascertained that meteors hit the moon more often than anyone ever expected,NASA said.Though this particular meteor was only 3-4 meters across,the flash should have been noticeable to anyone who was studying the moon with the naked eye at the time.It looked like a small pinpoint of light when this blog reviewed the video.
On the same date,the earth was also being pelted with numerous meteoroid impacts,as detected by all-sky cameras of NASA and the University of Western Ontario,described by NASA's Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environment Office as a short duration cluster of material that the earth and moon were traveling through together.It is a region of small rocks and dust the earth-moon system will travel through again the same time next year.
Cooke believes the lunar impact and the Chelyabinsk event in Russia in February 2013 may be related,both caused by passing through the same rocky,dusty region between the earth and the asteroid belt.The Chelyabinsk event,however,was 100,000 times more powerful than the lunar explosion;it damaged buildings and injured more than 1500 souls.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite will search for the new impact crater when it passes over that region of the moon again.The crater could be up to 66 feet wide.If the crater is found,it will help validate ground impact models of meteoroids.
Also,such knowledge could be useful to any future astronauts who may be spending extended periods on the lunar surface,for their own safety.The moon gets a lot of impacts because it lacks an atmosphere to vaporise meteoroids.