

An explosion equal to more than a kiloton of TNT rocked the sky over a remote part of northern Sudan late Monday night, ending a 20-hour scramble to track the first Earth impacting meteoroid to be discovered before impact.

Though the meteoroid was not expected to reach Earth's surface, the astronomers' goal was to refine the trajectory and predict where the automobile-sized rock was headed to test their ability to track potentially dangerous asteroids in the future.

There are three reported "sightings" of the resulting fireball so far: The first was from a weather satellite over Europe and Africa that imaged the fireball as a cluster of pixels; The second was a seismometer in Kenya that picked up the kiloton blast; And the third was a KLM pilot who saw the streak of light from 750 nautical miles away. On the map above, the plane is marked by the cross and the asteroid by the circle.

The space rock graciously targeted a very rural part of the world, allowing its gigantic fireball to serve as a warning to keep an eye on the sky. It also proved to be a good dry run for scientists to see how quickly they could coordinate observations and calculate trajectories. The real question is, if it had been bigger (in which case we might have had a few days more warning), and headed towards a major city, what could we have done?

This is the very scenario Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart has been asking the world to address. The time to make an emergency plan is not after you know where it is going to hit. Then only the impacted country will be concerned about it, and there might not be much they can do on their own. However if we come up with a global plan ahead of time, it could end up coming to the aid of my country just as well as yours.

Asteroid Impact [Space Weather.com]

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Image courtesy Jacob Kuiper and Meteosat 7