An Asteroid Exploded In Earth’s Atmosphere Just 8 Hours After It Was First Spotted

We got pretty lucky on Wednesday, Sept. 4 with an asteroid that no one, not NASA, not the European Space Agency (ESA), no one saw coming until eight hours before it slammed into Earth’s atmosphere with a giant explosion.

It wasn’t until astronomers from the Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded project at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, noticed the space rock that we had any idea it was heading for our planet.

The asteroid, named 2024 RW1, was only about 3-feet wide, so organizations like the ESA were quick to assure everyone that it was “harmless.”

The ESA also pointed out, however, that this was “just the ninth asteroid that humankind has ever spotted before impact.”

As predicted by the ESA and NASA’s Asteroid Watch website, the asteroid did explode into a giant green fireball around 12:46 a.m. local time on Sept. 5 near Luzon Island in the Philippines. They also reported that the asteroid’s impact was detected by multiple sensors.

Luckily, the asteroid was so small that it had no negative effect on Earth when it slammed into the atmosphere.

In 2022, an asteroid hit Earth only two hours after astronomers noticed it. That space rock created an explosion in the atmosphere over the Arctic near Iceland.

“Tiny asteroids like 2022 EB5 are numerous, and they impact into the atmosphere quite frequently – roughly every 10 months or so,” Paul Chodas, the director of CNEOS at JPL, said at the time. “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.”

In 2021, another asteroid almost smashed into Earth and no one saw it coming, not even NASA.

Unfortunately, should a larger asteroid make a beeline for Earth there currently isn’t much we can do about it.

That same year, 2021, a Japanese spacecraft bombed an asteroid expecting seismic activity and it barely moved.

Then, in 2022, NASA intentionally slammed its DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft into an asteroid to see if it could change the course of the space rock. It did, a little bit, but it also created than two million pounds of rocks and dust that could end up creating the first-ever human-made meteor shower.