An asteroid is about to hit Earth – but don’t worry, it is only small

Astronomers have just discovered that an asteroid is about to strike Earth at thousands of kilometres per hour, impacting just east of the Philippines and most likely in the sea. Thankfully, the relatively small object poses no harm and will burn up in the atmosphere in a fireball.

The asteroid, which is estimated to be roughly 1 metre across, was spotted earlier today by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey and given the designation CAQTDL2. It is due to strike Earth at around 1645 GMT, or 1745 London time, 1245 New York time and 0045 local time at the impact site in the Philippines.

It is currently estimated that CAQTDL2 will hit at a speed of 17.6 kilometres per second, or 63,360 kilometres per hour, which Alan Fitzsimmons at Queen’s University Belfast in the UK says is about average for such objects. “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. You don’t have the time to do that,” he says.

The good news is that there is no need for such an evacuation. Although the impact will be dramatic – potentially flaring as brightly as the moon in the night sky – it poses no danger to those on the ground. “An object this small can’t do any damage on the ground, we’re protected from them by the Earth’s atmosphere,” says Fitzsimmons. “It will harmlessly burn up and explode as a very impressive fireball.”

Fitzsimmons says that two or three objects this size strike Earth every year and that we are increasingly able to spot them early, with the first incoming asteroid being spotted by astronomers before landing in 2008. CAQTDL2 will be the ninth accurately predicted asteroid strike on Earth.

“The really positive aspect about this is that the survey telescopes are now good enough to spot these things coming in and give us a bit of warning,” he says. “Put another way, if this object had been much larger and so perhaps pose a threat to people on the ground, then it would be much brighter, and we’d have projected it much further out. So this actually is a really nice demonstration that the current survey systems are doing a very good job. 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.”

Not only is Earth developing and improving its early warning system, but in 2022 NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft proved that we have a chance of saving the planet from a catastrophic impact of a larger object. DART crashed into the 160-metre-wide moonlet Dimorphos and slowed it slightly, demonstrating that in theory we could avert such a disaster. Next month, the European Space Agency is due to launch its Hera mission to study the results of the impact up-close, and further improve our understanding of planetary defence.

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