NASA is scrambling after a massive object tore through the sky, exposing a terrifying gap in Earth’s planetary defense
Space is full of surprises.
NASA just had a pretty unsettling moment, missing a significant meteor explosion right over Cleveland, Ohio, on March 17. This blast, which delivered a shockwave equivalent to about 250 tons of TNT, came from an object that was just two meters wide and weighed roughly seven tonnes.
According to UNILAD, the meteor entered our atmosphere at approximately 8:57 AM EDT, first becoming visible at an altitude of around 50 miles above Lake Erie. It then traveled for more than 30 miles through the upper atmosphere before finally breaking apart at about 30 miles above northern Ohio.
As it fragmented, it released a huge burst of energy, creating a pressure wave that residents heard across parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. People reported a loud boom and a bright fireball streaking across the sky, with sightings quickly spreading online. Both the National Weather Service and NASA later confirmed the event with satellite data suggesting it was indeed a meteor.
It’s normal to expect NASA to know about every object entering the earth’s atmosphere
So how did NASA, with all its advanced systems, miss something so monumental? It comes down to size. While this meteor was certainly big enough to make a significant impact and cause a widespread boom, it was still too small for our current tracking systems to pick up in advance. NASA’s planetary defense efforts are mainly focused on larger Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs.
NEOs are the objects that could pose a truly serious, planet-altering threat if they hit us. The good news is that those massive, Hollywood-style asteroids are relatively easy to track, and we usually spot them years, sometimes even decades, before they get too close for comfort.
The real challenge, and what keeps people like Kelly Fast, head of planetary defense at NASA, up at night, isn’t the tiny bits or the huge cinematic threats. She explained to the American Association for the Advancement of Science that “small stuff is hitting us all the time so we’re not so much worried about that.” She also noted that “we’re not so worried about the large ones from the movies because we know where they are.”
Instead, Fast points to the “in between” asteroids, those about 140 meters and larger, as the real concern. These aren’t world-enders, but they could absolutely cause regional rather than global damage, and we simply don’t know where most of them are. There are an estimated 25,000 such asteroids out there, and scientists have only identified about 40% of them so far. It takes even the best telescopes an incredible amount of time and effort to find them.
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