A 6.5 foot space rock was hurtling toward Earth. Even though astronomers only caught sight of it two hours before impact, NASA is calling it a big success
While it’s big asteroids with world-ending potential that tend to be the focus of fiction, like in the popular movie Don’t Look Up, a much more common occurrence is that our planet is impacted by far small asteroids. These smaller examples usually burn up in the atmosphere and so do very little damage, like one which impacted the atmosphere on March 11, 2022. But this small asteroid was noteworthy for one reason: its impact had been predicted by astronomers. It’s very rare for a small asteroid impact to be predicted, but that’s what happened with asteroid 2022 EB5. It is just the fifth ever asteroid which has been observed before impacting the atmosphere (via JPL). This one was spotted a mere two hours before impact by K. Sarneczky at the Piszkéstető Observatory in northern Hungary, who reported it to an international directory called the Minor Planet Center.
