![]() ![]() ![]() “Tiny asteroids like 2022 EB5 are numerous, and they impact into the atmosphere quite frequently – roughly every 10 months or so,” said Paul Chodas, the director of CNEOS at JPL. They are much smaller than the objects that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is tasked by NASA with detecting and warning about. Tiny asteroids of this size get bright enough to be detected only in the last few hours before their impact (or before they make a very close approach to Earth). PST), 2022 EB5 hit the atmosphere as predicted by Scout, and infrasound detectors have confirmed the impact occurred at the predicted time.įrom observations of the asteroid as it approached Earth and the energy measured by infrasound detectors at time of impact, 2022 EB5 is estimated to have been about 6 1/2 feet (2 meters) in size. Scout determined that 2022 EB5 would enter the atmosphere southwest of Jan Mayen, a Norwegian island nearly 300 miles (470 kilometers) off the east coast of Greenland and northeast of Iceland. “As more observatories tracked the asteroid, our calculations of its trajectory and impact location became more precise.” We were able to determine the possible impact locations, which initially extended from western Greenland to off the coast of Norway,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at JPL who developed Scout. “Scout had only 14 observations over 40 minutes from one observatory to work with when it first identified the object as an impactor. CNEOS calculates every known near-Earth asteroid orbit to improve impact hazard assessments in support of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. Maintained by CNEOS at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Scout automatically searches the Minor Planet Center’s database for possible new short-term impactors. As soon as Scout determined that 2022 EB5 was going to hit Earth’s atmosphere, the system alerted the Center for Near Earth Object Studies ( CNEOS) and NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, and flagged the object on the Scout webpage to notify the near-Earth object observing community. NASA’s “Scout” impact hazard assessment system then took these early measurements to calculate the trajectory of 2022 EB5. The asteroid – estimated to be about 6 ½ feet (2 meters) wide – was discovered only two hours before impact. This animation shows asteroid 2022 EB5’s predicted orbit around the Sun before impacting into the Earth’s atmosphere on March 11, 2022.
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