Moon meteor blast was visible to naked eye: NASA

Melbourne: NASA has revealed that a boulder-sized meteor slammed into the moon in March, causing an explosion so bright that it was visible to the naked eye on Earth.

Though about 300 lunar impacts have been logged over the years, NASA scientists consider this latest impact, from March 17, much brighter than anything else observed. "We have seen a couple of others in the `wow` category but not this bright," said Robert Suggs, manager of NASA`s Lunar Impact Monitoring Program at Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The space rock is understood to have left a 20m-wide crater after it slammed into the Moon`s surface at 90,000km/h. The blast lasted only about a single second and shone like a 4th magnitude star-making it bright enough to see with just the unaided eye. ANI