NASA Films Biggest Explosion Ever Recorded on the Moon [VIDEO]

A small asteroid travelling at 56,000 miles per hour struck the surface of the Moon two months ago, creating an explosion so bright that anyone who happened to be looking at the Moon at the moment of impact would have seen the bright flash, according to report released Friday by NASA. And if the speed of the space rock were not astonishing enough, NASA managed to capture the impact on video, too.

For the past eight years, NASA has been monitoring the Moon for any signs of lunar meteor showers. As it turned out, meteor impacts on the lunar surface are quite common, with hundreds of detectable impacts hitting the Moon each year.

But the impact on March 17 was the biggest ever recorded by the project, creating an explosion with as much power as 5 tons of TNT.

"It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before," said Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.

The asteroid weighed 88 pounds (40kg) and was a little more than one foot (0.4 meters) wide, but it created a crater that could be as much as 66 feet (20 meters) wide.

At the same time, Earth was bombarded by what Cooke called an "an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors," but thanks to the Earth's atmosphere, all of the meteors burned up before making any impact.

Without an atmosphere, the Moon is afforded no such protection. But then how can something explode in a flash of light? NASA pointed out that while the Moon has no oxygen - usually a necessary component for a combustion explosion - the asteroid hit the lunar surface with such force that flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site.