Most asteroids that have impacted Earth were discovered many years, often many millions of years, after the event. The evidence? Roughly 200 known craters scar Earth’s surface, telling an impactful story of how our planet, and life on it, has been dramatically shaped by violent collisions with ancient space rocks. On occasion – five in human history, to be precise – we discover an asteroid before it strikes.
At 19:24 UTC on March 11, 2022, astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky discovered a bright and fast-moving new object in the sky using the 60cm Schmidt telescope at the Piszkésteto observatory, Hungary. He collected four observations in quick succession, and just 14 minutes later reported his findings to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), initially designating the object ‘Sar2593’.
The results were quickly published and used by automatic impact assessment systems around the world to estimate the possibility of an impact: at the time, it seemed unlikely, at less than 1%.
Krisztián continued to observe the object, making a further 10 observations soon after the discovery and again submitting them to the MPC. These, however, resulted in an entirely different scenario. Almost exactly an hour after it was detected at 20:25 UTC, ESA’s “Meerkat” monitoring system triggered an alert to the Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) based on the accumulated observations. READ MORE...
