In an effort to learn more about potentially hazardous asteroids, astronomers have used telescopic surveys to find an image of a space rock that produced a 0.4-kiloton fireball over the Pacific Ocean
Artist’s impression of a fireball in Earth’s atmosphere
urikyo33/Pixabay
Astronomers searching for the origins of a small asteroid that exploded over the Pacific Ocean in September 2020 have found an archive picture of it taken in space minutes before the impact, in the first discovery of its kind.
David Clark at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and his colleagues analysed satellite data of previous major fireballs, identifying ones created by space rocks that would be big enough to show up in images from telescopic surveys, which routinely monitor the …