Last weekend a small asteroid on a collision course with our planet was detected just hours before turning into a fireball over the Berlin area.
Asteroid 2024 BX1 (as it came to be known shortly after impacting the atmosphere) is no more, but our brief knowledge of its existence highlights our ever-improving ability to track movements in near-Earth space and our remaining blind spots.
Space rocks have been smashing into our planet for eons; almost all of them getting incinerated in our atmosphere with no warning. Every few decades one makes a notable impact on the surface. At least one time a large impactor caused an extinction event, which is actually how we mammals came to be in charge and the dinosaurs came to fuel our cars.
This is only the eighth time ever that a small earth-bound asteroid has been seen just before impact, but the accomplishment is quickly becoming more common.
The asteroid was only about a meter in diameter and was first spotted late on January 20 by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky using the 60 cm Schmidt Telescope at Hungary’s Piszkéstető Mountain Station, according to the European Space Agency. This is the third time Sárneczky has spotted a small object on approach.
Word spread throughout asteroid and fireball-spotting communities worldwide that a small impact was incoming. Other observations came in from skywatchers and monitoring systems like NASA’s Scout, eventually providing about two-hours heads up that 2024 BX1 was about to put on a show in the night skies over Germany.
The moment finally came on Sunday, Jan. 21, at 1:32 a.m. local time (CET).
“We held our breath and at 01:32 the time had come,” wrote Tobias Hoffman from Oldenburg University. “The meteor was clearly visible on webcams, the prediction came true, exactly as shown in the calculations! People in the region clearly saw the very bright glow, which only lasted a few seconds. At its maximum, however, the fireball was brighter than the moon!”
In the days that followed, scientists and enthusiasts hit the ground, scouring the nearby landscape for remaining fragments of the bolide that may have survived. The search yielded rocky fruit, with multiple chunks discovered.
The entire episode points to our increasing capabilities to monitor the environment immediately around our planet, which is hosting ever more satellites and artificial objects, not to mention defunct pieces of space junk. Asteroids pose potential threats to this technological infrastructure, and the larger ones may even pose a risk to property and people on Earth.
Unfortunately, our monitoring systems for watching the sky are not evenly distributed. Blind spots remain in the southern hemisphere and in the case of asteroids coming at us from behind the sun. The hope is that upcoming missions like NASA’s NEO Surveyor may help fill this gap.
