Early warning system catches asteroid hours before it smashes into Earth
Astronomers and the European Space Agency’s planetary defence community recently spotted an asteroid just hours before it struck the Earth 140 kilometers south of the Norwegian island of Jan Mayen in the Arctic sea, generating a blast equivalent to two to three thousand tonnes of exploding TNT.
Named 2022 EB5 by the Minor Planet Center, it is the first space rock observed in space from Europe before striking the Earth, and just the fifth space rock ever observed in space before striking the Earth.
According to a Monday news release by ESA’s near-Earth objects coordination centre, Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky discovered a fast-moving object near Earth around 7:24 p.m. GMT. Initial estimates put the chance of the object striking Earth at less than 1%.
But by 8.25pm GMT, ESA’s Meerkat asteroid impact warning system generated an alert, calculating a 100% chance the object would strike the Earth between 9:21 p.m. and 9:25 p.m. within a square of one thousand kilometers a few hundred kilometers north of Iceland.
Professional and amateur astronomers began trying to observe the object, which was already within 50,000 kilometers of Earth, but no one captured images or video of the fireball as the object entered the atmosphere at 9.22 pm GMT.
The impact did register on networks of infrasound — sounds waves below the threshold of human hearing — detectors in Iceland and Greenland however, and based on those recordings scientists calculated an impact releasing two to 3 kilotons of energy.
That level of energy release, about one-fifth the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, leads scientists to believe that 2022 EB5 was about three to four metres, or 6.5 to 9.8 feet, in diameter.
