ANTARIKSA — In the early hours of Sunday, January 21 2024, a small asteroid hurtled across the sky and hit the Earth’s atmosphere above Berlin, Germany. Its trajectory produces a bright fireball that can be seen from tens of kilometers away. Fortunately, this incident did not bring disaster to life below.
Such sightings usually occur several times a year, but yesterday’s incident in Berlin was unique. This is because the asteroid was only first detected by scientists about three hours before the impact. There were only seven previous events that were also detected before the space rock hit Earth.
The asteroid, named 2024 BXI, was first discovered by Krisztian Sarneczky, an astronomer at the Piszkesteto Mountain Station, part of the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. Sarneczky, who claimed to be hunting for asteroids, identified the cosmic rock using the 60 cm Schmidt telescope at the observatory.
Shortly after Sarneczky discovered the space rock, NASA provided detailed predictions regarding where and when the meteor would hit Earth. “Attention: A small asteroid will disintegrate into a harmless fireball west of Berlin near Nennhausen at 01:32 CET. Monitors will see it when it is clear!” NASA wrote in X before the change of day.
Also read: What does it feel like to walk on an asteroid? Scientists Explain
Cameras in the northern German city of Leipzig captured footage of the very bright meteor, appearing and disappearing in the span of a few seconds. The asteroid, which is estimated to be 1 meter wide, may begin disintegrating around 50 kilometers above the western region of Berlin.
“It probably dropped some meteorites to the ground along its trajectory,” Denis Vida, a postdoctoral associate for meteor physics at Western University, Canada, told CBS News.
Sarneczky has discovered hundreds of asteroids in recent years, including the first person to detect asteroid 2022 EB5 about two hours before it hit Earth’s atmosphere. He also used Konkoly Observatory data to find rocks that hit Earth.
The appearance of the asteroid is very unusual. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), 99 percent of near-Earth asteroids measuring less than 30 meters have not been discovered. The smaller an asteroid, the closer it will be to Earth before scientists can detect it. “That makes it difficult to estimate the impact in advance,” Para said Also Read: What is an Asteroid?
In some cases, near-Earth asteroids can hide in the sun’s rays, such as the meteor that shot from the direction of the rising sun over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. The space rock’s shock shattered building windows, blinded pedestrians, caused ultraviolet burns, and injured more than 1,600 people.
Currently, various government space agencies are developing new sky scanning technology to search for asteroids preparing to hit Earth, including NASA’s NEO Surveyor satellite and ESA’s NEOMIR. NEO is planned to be operational in 2027, while NEOMIR in 2030.
Starting in 2025, the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, funded by the National Science Foundation, will catalog the solar system from Earth. It is hoped that this data will greatly assist asteroid hunting efforts.
“It would take us 200 years to discover all the asteroids known to date, about 1.2 million asteroids,” Mario Juric, head of the solar system discovery team at the Rubin Observatory and director of the DiRAC Institute at the University of Washington, told Astronomy. However, he said, in Rubin’s first three to six months, the number of asteroids that could be discovered would be much greater. Source: Space.com
2024-01-22 23:16:00
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