• Nasa says force released was equal to 300 tonnes of TNT
• Fireball broke up over Massachusetts and New Hampshire
A METEOR crashing toward Earth exploded over the northeastern United States on Saturday, Nasa said, setting off booms that echoed over the region with a blast equivalent to 300 tonnes of TNT.
The fireball broke up over northeastern Massachusetts and southeastern New Hampshire at 2:06pm local time (1806 GMT) or (11:06pm PKT), the US space agency’s deputy news chief Jennifer Dooren told AFP in a statement.
“This fireball was not associated with any currently active meteor shower, but it was a natural object and not a re-entry of space debris or a satellite,” she said.
“The energy released at breakup is estimated to be equivalent to about 300 tonnes of TNT, which accounts for the loud booms,” she added.
The meteor was travelling at 75,000 miles per hour (more than 120,000 kilometres per hour) at an altitude of 40 miles when it broke apart, Dooren said.
Area residents were alarmed by the unexpected loud booms, with social media users reporting they were so powerful that houses were shaking.
It was detected by eyewitnesses and NOAA’s GOES-19 satellite, Nasa said in a post on X.
Before Nasa’s confirmation, NBC10 meteorologist Pamela Gardner suggested the boom could have been caused by a bolide, a bright meteor entering the Earth’s atmosphere.
“There’s a satellite lightning detection around Boston — but no lightning. No earthquakes on USGS either,” Gardner wrote on X.
American Meteor Society programme monitor Robert Lunsford said the group received dozens of reports from Delaware to Montreal with people either hearing the double boom, feeling the ground shake or seeing the fireball — which he said looked like a shooting star in the daytime sky, Arab News reported. “It was definitely bigger than a normal fireball, about a yard wide,” he said.
In 2013, a fireball streaked above Chelyabinsk, Russia. The house-sized space rock blew apart 14 miles above the ground, releasing a blast equivalent to 440,000 tonnes of TNT, Nasa said.
The explosion blew out windows over 200 square miles (518 square kilometres), injuring more than 1,600 people, mostly due to broken glass.
Published in Dawn, June 1st, 2026