REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, BERLIN — A small asteroid streaked across the sky and hit Earth’s atmosphere near Berlin, Germany, in the early hours of Jan. 21. The crash produced a bright but harmless fireball.
A phenomenon like this usually occurs several times a year, but this time is unique because it was detected for the first time by scientists, about three hours before the accident. This is the eighth time researchers have seen one of the space rocks before the collision.
The asteroid, named 2024 BXI, was first discovered by Krisztián Sárneczky, an astronomer at the Piszkéstető mountain station, part of the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary, who claims to be an asteroid hunter. He identified the cosmic rock using the observatory’s 60-cm Schmidt telescope.
Not long after the space rock was discovered, NASA provided detailed predictions of where and when the meteor would hit. NASA also said that the resulting fireball would not be dangerous.
“Warning: 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 tweeted on the evening of January 20, as reported on the site SpaceTuesday (1/23/2024).
Camera live in the northern German city of Leipzig, they captured footage of the incredibly bright meteor as it appeared and disappeared in the space of a few seconds. The asteroid, which was 3.3 feet (1 meter) wide before the crash, likely began to disintegrate about 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Berlin.
“And maybe knocking some meteorites to the ground along the way,” said Denis Vida, a postdoctoral associate in meteor physics at Western University in Canada. CBS News.
Sárneczky has discovered hundreds of asteroids in recent years and was the first to detect asteroid 2022 EB5 about two hours before it hit Earth’s atmosphere. He also used data from the Konkoly Observatory to find the incoming rock.
The accident was very unusual. According to the European Space Agency, 99% of near-Earth asteroids closer than 30 meters (98 feet) have yet to be discovered. According to experts, the smaller an asteroid is, the closer it will be to Earth before scientists can detect it, making it difficult to predict its impact in advance.
In some cases, near-Earth asteroids can hide in the sun’s rays, such as the meteor that hurtled from the rising sun over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013. The striking space rock shattered windows, hit pedestrians and caused burns. flash ultraviolet light and injured more than 1,600 people.
Government space agencies are currently developing new sky-screening technology to search for asteroids before they make contact with Earth. These include NASA’s NEO Surveyor satellite, currently scheduled for launch in 2027, and ESA’s NEOMIR, which is not expected to launch until 2030.
By 2025, the Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile, funded by the National Science Foundation, will catalog the solar system from Earth. This is expected to greatly aid asteroid hunting efforts.
“It took us 200 years to discover all the asteroids we know of to date, about 1.2 million asteroids,” Mario Jurić, head of the solar system discovery team at the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute, told Astronomy .
2024-01-23 09:32:39
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