Watch below as a stunning blue-green fireball blazes across Spain and Portugal on Saturday night. The meteor—estimated to be just a few feet across—was actually a hunk of a comet barreling toward Earth at 100,000 miles per hour to finally explode about 37 miles above the Atlantic Ocean.
After numerous videos of the bright flash appeared on social media, the European Space Agency commented:
"It would have been great to detect the object prior to colliding with the Earth," Juan Luis Canoa of the ESA's Planetary Defence Office told the New York Times.
After all, a larger object could cause devastating destruction on the ground. Remember the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor? That 55-foot space rock wasn't spotted before it exploded above Russia with the force of 500,000 tons of TNT, injuring over 1,200 people.
Fortunately, new observatories and other ground- and space-based technology will hopefully help astronomers spot the largest space boulders before a catastrophic big boom occurs.
Previously: Last night`s massive boom over Puget Sound was likely exploding meteor
