A recently discovered asteroid was on a collision course with Earth and created a stunning lightshow above Eastern Siberia this afternoon.
The tiny space rock, known among scientists as COWECP5, was expected to burn the through the sky at 11:14am ET as it was destroyed by Earth’s the atmosphere.
Thankfully, the asteroid was small in size, estimated to be a mere 27 inches in diameter. Scientists expected it to be no match for the layers of gas surrounding our planet, meaning it wouldn’t pose a risk to humans.
It was spotted thanks to NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, a state-of-the-art asteroid detection system that searches the entire dark sky “every 24 hours for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a future impact hazard to Earth”, according to the agency’s website.
The asteroid, which was the fourth to hit our planet’s atmosphere this year, was detected seven hours before it was due to hit, as per MailOnline.
The Kitt Peak National Observatory, a project funded by NASA that tracks near-Earth objects, also detected the rocky body earlier today.
C0WEPC5, was the fourth so called “imminent impactor” (asteroids identified within hours of their predicted atmospheric entry) discovered this year, and only the 11th ever detected, National World reports.
Speaking ahead of the asteroid’s arrival Alan Fitzsimmons, an expert in the field of asteroid and cometary science at Queen’s University Belfast, told New Scientist that the the early warning was a positive sign that our ability to detect such entities before they stike Earth is improving.
“It’s a small one, but it will still be quite spectacular,” he told the outlet, adding: “It will be dark over the impact site and for several hundreds of kilometres around there’ll be a very impressive, very bright fireball in the sky.”
Fitzsimmons says early detection gives scientists an opportunity to recover and study surviving bits of asteroid that make it through the atmosphere. But the ability to spot dangerous and larger objects hurtling towards Earth is also critical for anticipating threats from larger objects.
Spotting them and their trajectory ahead of time might provide an opportunity to them the objects away, or evacuate at-risk areas.
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have dedicated programmes for detecting and tracking asteroids via a network of dedicated observatories, the outlet reports.
Amateur astronomers also assist the analysis by recording to the positions of known objects, allowing scientists to better predict and understand their orbits.
