A 3-foot-wide asteroid lit up the European sky on February 12 when it turned into a fireball. Although asteroids often make close trips to Earth, they rarely come close enough to cause any potential damage. The chance of asteroids hitting the surface is even less. But that doesn’t mean these space rocks have never hit Earth. In fact, a small asteroid hit the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia and caused millions of dollars in damage, injuring more than 1,400 people on February 15, 2013.
Almost exactly a decade later, 3.2 feet wide small planet turned into a fireball over Europe, where it was captured by astronomers and skywatchers. It was first discovered by Krisztian Sarneczky with a length of 2 feet telescope at the Piszkesteto Station of the Konkoly Observatory, located about 100 km northeast of Budapest. The information was then passed on to the European Space Agency (ESA) several hours before the collision. The asteroid, named SAR 2667, entered the atmosphere on February 12 at around 10 p.m. EST.
Sárneczky told Space.com senior writer Tereza Pultarova, “I discovered this tiny body in a regular NEO. [near Earth object] hunting. It was immediately obvious that it was a NEO, but it wasn’t particularly fast in the sky, as it was heading straight towards the sky. weand it’s faint.”
According to ESA, this is only the 7th time an asteroid collision has been predicted compared to the previous prediction by Sárneczky. ESA tweeted, “@esaoperations reported a 1 meter long meteorite before it entered Earth’s atmosphere in northern France early this morning: this is only the 7th time an #impact of the predicted asteroid – but a sign of rapid advances in global detection!”
NASA technology is used to study asteroids
NASA not only uses its space telescopes and observatories like NEOWISE to observe and study distant asteroids, but also uses a variety of ground-based telescopes such as the Millimeter/submillimeter Array. Atacama (ALMA) is located in the Antofagasta Region of the Atacama Desert in chile.
NASA uses a Terrestrial Asteroid Impact Last Warning System (ATLAS) and scans the night sky for moving objects and reports any possible asteroid detection, while a Some space observatories use infrared sensors to detect asteroids and their characteristics.
