Here’s what NASA says about the asteroid that crashed into Earth on March 15, 2022.
Earth continues to attract objects in space to itself due to its strong gravitational pull. But imagine if every object started hitting or bumping into the planet! Such events are rare, however, because when an object from space reaches the Earth’s atmosphere, it is largely destroyed. Only a few objects like asteroids, meteors, etc., which are very large in size, can manage to actually hit the Earth’s surface. And when was the last time that happened, you might be thinking. The answer is shocking. This happened very recently, on March 15, 2022. Yes, a real asteroid crashed into our planet.
According to information provided by NASA, it was a small asteroid that hit Earth’s atmosphere over the Norwegian Sea before it largely disintegrated and then crashed into the planet. “But this event was not a complete surprise: astronomers knew it was on a collision course, predicting exactly where and when the impact would occur,” NASA said.
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Two hours before the asteroid hit, K. Sarneczky of the Piszkesteto Observatory in northern Hungary first reported observations of the small object of the Small Planet Center, the internationally recognized clearinghouse for measurements of the location of small celestial bodies. The object was posted on the Minor Planet Center’s Near-Earth Object Confirmation page to flag it for further observations that would confirm it as a previously unknown asteroid.
NASA’s Scout Impact Assessment System then took these early measurements to calculate the trajectory of 2022 EB5. As soon as Scout detects that 2022 EB5 will hit Earth’s atmosphere, the system alerts the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) and NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office and flags the object on Scout’s web page to notify the object near-Earth observing community.
Maintained by CNEOS at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Scout automatically searches the Small Planet Center’s database for possible new short-duration impacts. CNEOS calculates every known near-Earth asteroid orbit to improve impact hazard estimates in support of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
From observations of the asteroid as it approached Earth and the energy measured by infrasound detectors at the time of impact, 2022 EB5 is estimated to have been about 6 1/2 feet (2 meters) in size. Asteroids of this size only become bright enough to be detected in the last few hours before impact (or before they come very close to Earth). They are much smaller than the objects that NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is tasked with detecting and warning about.
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“Small asteroids like 2022 EB5 are numerous, and they hit the atmosphere quite often — about every 10 months,” said Paul Chodas, director of CNEOS at JPL, as quoted by NASA. “But very few of these asteroids have actually been detected in space and observed extensively before impact, mainly because they are very faint until the last few hours and the observing telescope needs to be looking at the right place in the sky at the right time for one to be detected.
A larger asteroid with potential for a dangerous impact will be found much further from Earth. NASA’s goal is to track such asteroids and calculate their trajectories so that there is warning many years in advance of a potential impact, if one is ever identified. But this real-world event with a very small asteroid allowed the planetary defense community to exercise capabilities and gave some confidence that the CNEOS impact prediction models are very capable of informing the response to a potential impact on a larger object.
“2022 EB5 is only the fifth small asteroid to be detected in space before hitting Earth’s atmosphere. The first asteroid detected and tracked long before it hit Earth was 2008 TC3, which entered the atmosphere over Sudan and disintegrated in October 2008. This 13-foot-wide (4-meter) asteroid scattered hundreds of small meteorites over the Nubian desert. As surveys become more sophisticated and sensitive, more of these harmless objects will be detected before they enter the atmosphere,” NASA said.
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