A small asteroid will hit Earth in the coming hours

A small asteroid about one meter wide will hit Earth's atmosphere on September 4, 2024, and researchers from the European Space Agency expect the asteroid to hit the atmosphere over the Philippines at around 19:46 Doha time.

An asteroid of this size is expected to burn up completely in Earth's atmosphere, possibly creating a bright fireball that anyone in this part of the world could see.

Scientists at the European Space Agency explain that an asteroid of this size hits the Earth about once every two weeks, and according to NASA, about 48.5 tons of meteorites hit the Earth every day, but most of these rocky pieces are as small as a grain of sand, and burn up completely upon entering the Earth's atmosphere.

For a piece of space rock to reach Earth, it must be at least 5 meters wide when it enters the atmosphere.

It is known that the larger the diameter of the asteroid, the less likely it is to hit the Earth. An asteroid 100 meters wide is likely to hit the Earth once every 10,000 years.

📣UPDATE 2: We expect the ~1 m asteroid discovered this morning to strike Earth's atmosphere over the Philippines near Luzon Island at 16:39 UTC today.

Thanks to new observations, we now have a very good idea of where it will impact.

And the object has a name! Welcome to Earth… https://t.co/C1lVUfP9Uu pic.twitter.com/agxS4tRuHm

— European Space Agency (@esa) September 4, 2024

Earth has witnessed events of this kind before. In 1908, a meteor (50-60 meters in diameter) exploded in the atmosphere with a force of about 12 megatons (about a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that hit Hiroshima), and it fell in a remote area south of Russia's Krasnoyarsk Krai on the morning of June 30.

The explosion destroyed an estimated 80 million trees across 2,150 square kilometers of forest, and eyewitness reports indicated that the explosion was followed by strong earthquakes and a pressure wave that threw people into the air, and that at least 3 people may have been killed in the event.

Although finding these faint objects near the Earth is like searching for a needle in a haystack, the world currently contains a large number of sky survey observatories specialized in finding these objects, no matter how small their diameter, and the relevant agencies usually announce the date of the asteroid’s collision immediately after its discovery.

Unlike most conventional telescopes, which have a narrow field of view and high magnification, survey telescopes have a wide field of view to scan the entire sky in a reasonable amount of time with enough sensitivity to pick out faint objects close to Earth.

Source: Websites