From time to time, we are lucky enough to witness the odd astronomical object with the naked eye. At the beginning of the month, we contemplated with our own eyes the approach of the “green comet”, the C/2022 E3 (ZTF), which passed “brushing” our planet almost 42 million kilometers from our atmosphere.
The approach of this “near-Earth object” was already planned in the 2023 astronomical calendar, which lists all those events that will take place in our skies and that can be followed through the sky map app. But some of these celestial bodies, the smallest, are not detected until they enter our atmosphere or even upon impact on Earth, something that is already changing with the advancement of science.
On the night of February 12-13, a small asteroid impacted the English Channel after entering the Earth’s atmosphere and producing a “ball of fire”. According to The Telegraph, this meteoroid measured 1 meter and was sighted shortly before 4 pm (Spanish time).
The arrival and impact of the asteroid, which has been named Sar2667, was detected in advance, and the object was expected to “will impact safely” against the Earth’s atmosphere near the French city of Rouen, as reported by the European Space Agency.
The agency tweeted that this early detection of an asteroid impact, the seventh in history, is “a sign of rapid advances in global asteroid detection capabilities”. The last asteroid whose entry into the Earth’s atmosphere was predicted in advance was seen in the sky of Ontario (Canada), in November last year.
The event is of great importance, since, as explained in Wales Online by the American physicist and specialist in air explosions Mark Boslough, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, although “airbursts of this size occur somewhere several times a year”, “rarely discovered in advance”. The scientist also said that it is the first time in history that this has happened “over a populated area sufficiently in advance to obtain data”.
