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- A small asteroid hit Earth last week, mere hours after astronomers first spotted it.
- The space rock created an explosion in the atmosphere over the Arctic near Iceland.
- Read more news about asteroids here.
Last week, on March 11, a small asteroid smashed into Earth and almost no one knew about it.
Heck, astronomers tasked with keeping track of such things weren’t even aware of the asteroid’s existence until just two hours before it hit.
Asteroid 2022 EB5 struck the ocean 300 miles off Norway’s Jan Mayen Island at around 9:20 p.m.GMT. The space rock, which was between 3 and 7 feet wide, was only first detected at Piszkéstető Station Observatory in Hungary at around 7:20 p.m. GMT.
NASA said in a press release, “Asteroid 2022 EB5 was too small to pose a hazard to Earth, but its discovery marks the fifth time that any asteroid has been observed before impacting into the atmosphere.”
Once the observatory in Hungary confirmed their sighting, NASA’s “Scout” impact hazard assessment system went to work.
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As soon as Scout determined that 2022 EB5 was going to hit Earth’s atmosphere, the system alerted the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) and NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, and flagged the object on the Scout webpage to notify the near-Earth object observing community. Maintained by CNEOS at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Scout automatically searches the Minor Planet Center’s database for possible new short-term impactors. CNEOS calculates every known near-Earth asteroid orbit to improve impact hazard assessments in support of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
Asteroid 2022 EB5 was too small to be detected more than a few hours before impact with Earth
“Scout had only 14 observations over 40 minutes from one observatory to work with when it first identified the object as an impactor. We were able to determine the possible impact locations, which initially extended from western Greenland to off the coast of Norway,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at JPL who developed Scout. “As more observatories tracked the asteroid, our calculations of its trajectory and impact location became more precise.”
“Tiny asteroids like 2022 EB5 are numerous, and they impact into the atmosphere quite frequently – roughly every 10 months or so,” said Paul Chodas, the director of CNEOS at JPL. “But very few of these asteroids have actually been detected in space and observed extensively prior to impact, basically because they are very faint until the last few hours, and a survey telescope has to observe just the right spot of sky at the right time for one to be detected.”
NASA states that a larger asteroid with hazardous impact potential would be discovered much farther from Earth and much sooner than Asteroid 2022 EB5 was detected.