Asteroid Detected Hours Before Earth Impact

A small asteroid discovered on Wednesday harmlessly burned up in Earth's atmosphere the same day, NASA said. The asteroid—about 3 feet across—was spotted by astronomers in Arizona and broke apart over the coast of the Philippines hours after the discovery. This space rock, dubbed 2024 RW1, is only the ninth to have been spotted before its impact, the AP reports.

• The asteroid was traveling at around 40,000mph, which Alan Fitzsimmons at Queen's University Belfast says is about average. "Don't be fooled by Hollywood movies where you can see the thing coming screaming through the sky and you've got time to run out the house, get the cat, jump in the car, and drive somewhere," he tells New Scientist. "You don't have the time to do that."

• The asteroid was discovered through the Catalina Sky Survey, which is run by the University of Arizona and funded by NASA.
• "BIG NEWS!" the Catalina Sky Survey said in a post on X early Wednesday. "CSS observer Jacqueline Fazekas has just discovered a small meteoroid that will harmlessly impact with Earth's atmosphere in about 8 hours over the Western Pacific."
• Fitzsimmons says that if the asteroid had been big enough to be a possible threat to people, it would have been brighter and likely would have been spotted sooner. "So this actually is a really nice demonstration that the current survey systems are doing a very good job," he says. "We're probably averaging about one small asteroid detected before it hits the atmosphere every year now, and the survey systems are only getting better."

(More asteroid stories.)