Our cover picture ...
… shows the explosion cloud at an altitude of about 25km (yellow/orange, marked with a red arrow) and its elongated shadow (brown) from the entry of a body about 10m in size over the Bering Sea. The image comes from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Earth observation satellite TERRA. The event took place on 18 December 2018 at 23:48:20 UTC and was recorded by more than 16 infrasound sensors worldwide. However, the data were not made public until 8 March 2019. With an impact energy of 173 kT TNT, this is the second strongest explosion of a cosmic body in the Earth’s atmosphere since measurements began in 1988. The largest explosion occurred on 15.02.2013 over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk (440 kT TNT).
© Cover picture: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
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