One fireball, Chelyabinsk, accounts for 36.5% of the energy of all 1,073 in NASA’s catalogue
The catalogue starts in 1988. A typical fireball in it releases about 0.2 kt, roughly 2,200 times less than Chelyabinsk.
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Event counts and total energy can be distributed very differently. This share refers only to the selected sensor-report records; the typical fireball is the median one.
Bars share one scale. The source values and their units are listed below.
- Largest-record estimated energy kilotons TNT, estimate
441 (2013-02-15T03:20:26Z)
- Sum of published estimates kilotons TNT, estimate
1,207.428 (2026-10-06)
- Median of all records kilotons TNT, estimate
0.2 (2026-10-06)
Sort 1073 published NASA/JPL CNEOS records by approximate impact energy. Snapshot 2026-10-06; coverage 1988-04-15–2026-09-15. This is an incomplete sensor-report catalogue, not all atmospheric impacts. Share = 100×largest-record energy / sum of impact-e across all records. Summing approximate estimates across different years does not estimate an annual flow. Typical is the median, one impact-e per event.
NASA/JPL CNEOS, U.S. Government sensors, API v1.2. UTC time of peak brightness. Total impact energy is an empirical estimate, not energy of a ground strike or damage. Optical energy converted from 10¹⁰ J into J. Altitude refers to peak brightness. Missing values are not zero; many fireballs are unreported, so catalogue record counts do not estimate real incidence or its trend. CNEOS does not independently verify parameters. Event-level uncertainty/provenance is limited; speeds are not used to infer new orbits or interstellar origins.
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