The original explosion was detected in December by military satellites; NASA was notified of the event by the US Air Force and confirmed the details recently. It went largely unnoticed until now because it blew up over the Bering Sea, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Upon further examination, the path of the meteor did cross common airline routes, and NASA is asking any pilots if they saw anything around noon on December 19, 2018 that resembled the massive space rock. This fireball has been dubbed the second largest of its kind in 30 years.
"A fireball this big is only expected about two or three times every 100 years," Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer at NASA,told BBC.