So, it's obvious that any nuclear detonation is visible from ISS, but recent interview with retired U.S. astronaut Col. Terry W. Virts raised one question. Could he really see usual, non-nuclear explosions from ISS?
The interview itself is here. At 08:33 is the fragment I'm interested in.
As an additional info: most powerful conventional russian bombs are 1200 kg, 2207 kg and 4287 kg in TNT equivalent according to wikipedia
How big an explosion can you see from space? (from ISS)
byu/Fufenchik inspace
2 Comments
Depending on the contrast. Big ships are visible as white dots with the naked eye (roughly 100m resolution capacity from 400km).
ChatGPT o3 explanation:
“At night an astronaut on the International Space Station (≈ 400 km up) can see a point-like flash whose luminous power is only a few × 10⁸ W for a tenth of a second—roughly a **5-ton-of-TNT** detonation. Anything brighter (including the 1-, 2- and 4-ton Russian bombs you mention, if it happens to be cloud-free and within the crew’s field of view) will show up as a brief star-like sparkle, very similar to the lightning flashes that crews routinely watch and photograph. By day, however, the glare of sunlit clouds and ground light hides everything short of a volcano or nuclear fireball; then you would have to rely on the size of the dust-and-smoke plume, which has to be > 100 m across to be resolved, corresponding to hundreds of tons of high explosive.”