Apr 22, 2014 03:20 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

The asteroid that tore through the Earth's atmosphere and landed in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk last year caught the world's attention, but scientists say these things happen quite often.

According to BBC News, the B612 Foundation released a visualization of how often asteroids actually crash to Earth. The group aims to inform the general public that these events do happen, even if they are not always as visible as the Chelyabinsk event.

"This is a bit like earthquakes," Ed Lu, former shuttle astronaut and CEO of the B612 Foundation, told BBC News.

The group, based in the U.S. and made up in part of former NASA astronauts, found 26 explosions on Earth went unnoticed and without investigation between 2000 and 2013. All were asteroid strikes and, like earthquakes, they are unpredictable. Each explosion ranged from mild-to-little power to the force for several A-bombs going off at once. They are often never paid attention to because they often land in the middle of the ocean.

"In the cities that have a major danger - Tokyo, Los Angeles, San Francisco - they know the odds of big earthquakes by observing how many small earthquakes there are," Lu said. "Because there's a known distribution of earthquakes, meaning that earthquakes come in all sizes, small to large - if I can measure the small ones, I know how many big ones they're going to be. And you can do this with asteroids.

"These asteroid impacts in the last decade have been ones that we haven't had much data on until recently, and they tell us that in fact asteroid impacts are more common than we thought."

The ultimate goal for the project is to detect asteroids early on, aiding efforts already being made by NASA and other space agencies.

"Picture trying to spot something that's only the size of a small apartment building, that's tens of millions of miles from Earth, and that's black against a black background. That's incredibly hard," Lu said. "That's what requires the technological advances of Sentinel."

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