“We knew he was on a collision course.”

A small asteroid hit Earth’s atmosphere above the Norwegian Sea and then disintegrated on March 11, 2022: This event was not unexpected at all. “Astronomers knew he was on his way to collisionAnd they expected exactly where is she And the when The effect will happen“: This is what NASAThe 2022 EB5 “Space Stone” collision inventory.

Two hours before the asteroid impact, K. Sarneczky The Piszkéstető Observatory in northern Hungary was the first to report observations of the small body to the Minor Planet Center, the internationally recognized center for measuring the location of small celestial bodies. The object was placed on the Minor Planet Center’s NEO confirmation page to distinguish it for further observations that confirmed it was a previously unknown asteroid.

impact risk assessment systemsearchlightThen NASA made the first measurements to calculate the trajectory 2022 AD 5.
“Once Scout decided that 2022 EB5 was about to hit Earth’s atmosphereThe system alerted Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) and the Planetary Defense Coordination Office From NASA and mark the object on the Scout webpage to notify a “near Earth” object to the monitoring community,NASA explained.
operated by CNEOS at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, searchlight Automatically searches the Minor Planet Center database for potential new short-term impacts. CNEOS calculates every known near-Earth orbit of an asteroid to improve impact risk assessments in support of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office.

“Scout 14 only had 40 minutes of observatory observations to work with when he first identified the object as a collision object. We were able to identify potential collision zones, which initially stretched from western Greenland to areas off the coast of Norway.Said David Farnocchia, the navigation engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who developed the Scouts. “The more observers follow the asteroid, the more accurate our calculations of its impact trajectory and location become.“.

Scout has determined that 2022 EB5 will enter the atmosphere southwest of Jan Mayen, a Norwegian island about 470 kilometers off the east coast of Greenland and northeastern Iceland. at 22:23 Italian timeAnd the 2022 EB5 hit atmosphere Scout also predicted and infrasound detectors confirmed that the impact occurred on time.

From observations of the asteroid as it approached Earth and the energy measured by infrasound detectors at the moment of impact, it is estimated that 2022 EB5 is the size of about 2 meters.
“Small asteroids of this size become bright enough to be detected only in the last few hours before they impact (or before they get too close to Earth),“NASA Identified. They are much smaller than the objects that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (which has been assigned to them by NASA) have been commissioned to detect.”

“Small asteroids like 2022 EB5 are numerous and impact the atmosphere frequently, roughly every 10 months or so,“I have announced Paul ChodasCNEOS Director at JPL. “However, very few of these asteroids have been discovered in space and were observed extensively before the collision, mainly because they were so faint until the last few hours and the detection telescope would have to keep an eye on the right point in the sky at the right time to be able to spot them.“.

A larger asteroid will be discovered that may have a much more dangerous impact far from Earth. The agency said that NASA’s goal is to monitor such asteroids and calculate their trajectories so that it would have many years before a potential impact if one were identified.
The event involving a very small asteroid allowed the planetary defense community to exercise its capabilities and gave some confidence that CNEOS’ impact prediction models are able to determine the response to the potential impact of a larger object.

2022 AD 5 It is the fifth small asteroid to be discovered in space before it hit the Earth’s atmosphere. It was the first asteroid to be discovered and monitored before it hit Earth 2008 TC3, which entered the atmosphere over Sudan and disintegrated in October 2008: the 4-meter-wide asteroid scattered hundreds of small meteorites over the Nubian Desert. “As detection systems become more complex and sensitive, more of these harmless objects will be detected before they enter the atmosphere.NASA concluded.

Asteroid collision with Earth: only two hours from discovery to atmosphere collision, “explosion like 2 kilotons of TNT”