The Air Force said Friday that there was no damage to Thule Air Base in Greenland after a large meteor fell nearby last week.
The fireball incident occurred just miles from the remote military base on July 25 and entered the atmosphere with a 2.1 kiloton force, according to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 15 kilotons.
The Air Force 21st Space Wing monitors missile launches and space activity via sensors at Thule, and directed any questions to NASA, which did not immediately provide a statement.
The details had been published earlier by NASA on its website and apparently tweeted by a user who identified himself as working at the lab, but the meteor caused a flurry of public interest after media reports on Friday.
A fireball was detected over Greenland on July 25, 2018 by US Government sensors at an altitude of 43.3 km. The energy from the explosion is estimated to be 2.1 kilotons. pic.twitter.com/EePuk14Pqd
— Rocket Ron ? (@RonBaalke) July 31, 2018
“Two kiloton, that is sort of a very low-yield nuclear weapon level,” said Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, who highlighted the incident on Twitter.
But that does not mean a big explosion. The kiloton estimate is just a measure of the energy expended by the meteor as it moved through the atmosphere, Kristensen said.
“We don’t know how that burn happened, it could have burned for the entire stretch or it could have been a blast at the end of it of course, we just don’t know,” he said.
