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2008 TC3 animation. (Astronomical Institute of Charles University/CC BY 4.0) In 2008, something unique fell out of the sky over Sudan, exploding into fragments across the vast, arid expanses of the Nubian Desert. This hurtling object from above became known as Almahata Sitta: a collection of roughly 600 meteorite fragments, painstakingly recovered by researchers, and taking its name – 'Station Six' – from a nearby train station. What was unique about Almahata Sitta is that it represented something unprecedented in astronomy: the first time an asteroid impact was successfully predicted in advance by scientists. Ever since, the splinters of...

Wow. A low-flying space rock set a record last Friday (appropriately, the 13th), when 2020 VT4 passed just under 400 kilometers (250 miles) over the Southern Pacific. The asteroid was spotted by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii in the early morning hours of Saturday, November 14, just 15 hours after approach. This is not uncommon for fast-movers, especially asteroids that are coming at the Earth from our sunward blind-spot, like 2020 VT4. Newly-discovered asteroid A10sHcN approached Earth yesterday, passing only a few hundred miles above the South Pacific Ocean. This...

A mini asteroid collided safely with Sudan this week, but mega disaster looms with nearly 1000 hazardous near-Earth objects roaming our universe—plus even more dangerous ones we haven't spotted yet. With no response plan for the worst-case scenario in place anywhere on Earth, four-time shuttle astronaut Thomas D. Jones offers a call to arms against the coming cosmic storm. Early last Monday, Richard Kowalski, a University of Arizona astronomer at the Catalina Sky Survey team's 60-in. search telescope atop Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, flashed word to NASA of the discovery of a new Near Earth Object (NEO). The small asteroid,...

...Last night (Sunday, October 5th), a telescope on Mount Lemmon, Arizona, detected a tiny moving blip, the signature of a small chunk of rock moving rapidly through space. Twenty-five observations have been done since then by professional and amateur astronomers around the world, and the object's orbit has been pinned down with fairly high precision. It is almost certain to hit Earth's atmosphere around 10:46 p.m. EDT tonight, October 6th. (That's 2:46 a.m. October 7th, Greenwich Mean Time.) The rock is roughly 10 feet (3 meters) across, and it's expected to enter the atmosphere above northern Sudan at about 8...

AN asteroid discovered today will hit Earth's atmosphere over Sudan in a few hours but will burn up before it can hit the ground or endanger aircraft, astronomers say. The asteroid would create a large fireball about 10.46pm EDT (1.46pm AEST) as it burns up, a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "We want to stress that this object is not a threat," said Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at Harvard in Massachusetts. "We're excited since this is the first time we have issued a prediction that an object will enter Earth's...

WASHINGTON – Astronomers say a small asteroid is about to make a fiery but harmless dive into Earth's atmosphere early Tuesday morning over Africa. Harvard scientists announced late Monday afternoon that the unnamed asteroid will burn up in the sky, making a fireball that people in northern Africa should be able to see. The rock is between 3 feet and 15 feet in diameter. It's expected to enter Earth's atmosphere above Sudan at 10:46 p.m. EDT Monday, which is just before dawn in Africa.

AN asteroid discovered today will hit Earth's atmosphere over Sudan in a few hours -SNIP- The asteroid would create a large fireball about 10.46pm EDT (1.46pm AEST) as it burns up, a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "We want to stress that this object is -SNIP- a threat," said Timothy Spahr, director of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at Harvard in Massachusetts. "We're excited since this is the first time we have issued a prediction that an object will enter Earth's atmosphere," Dr Spahr said. The asteroid, known as a meteoroid, -SNIP- "A typical meteor...

A space rock a few metres across exploded over northern Sudan early in the morning of Tuesday 7 October. The small asteroid mostly disintegrated when it collided with Earth's atmosphere, but fragments may have reached the surface. Such an event happens roughly every three months. But this is "the first time we were able to discover and predict an impact before the event", says Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) programme at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Incoming! The story began on Sunday evening, when astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, discovered...

STRANGE ASTEROID: Newly-discovered asteroid 2009 BD is slowly passing by Earth today only 400,000 miles away. The small 10m-wide space rock poses no threat, but it merits attention anyway. The orbit of 2009 BD appears to be almost identical to the orbit of Earth. 2009 BD may be a rare co-orbital asteroid, circling the sun in near-tandem with our planet. Extrapolating the motion of 2009 BD into the future, we see that it remains in the vicinity of Earth for many months to come, never receding farther than 0.1 AU (9.3 million miles) until Nov. 2010. Future observations may reveal...

The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory is launching its Fall 2009 Evening Lecture Series with talks on wandering solar system planets and searches for hazardous asteroids from Mount Lemmon... Planetary sciences professor Renu Malhotra will speak on "Migrating Planets" on Tuesday, Sept. 15. [whoops] Did the solar system always look the way it is now? New studies by Malhotra and others find that the outer planets -- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune -- were more tightly clustered in the early solar system, then moved away from each other. Malhotra's models show that as the solar system evolved, Jupiter...

When an asteroid was spotted heading towards our planet last October, researchers rushed to document a cosmic impact from start to finish for the first time. Roberta Kwok tells the tale.Around midnight on 6 October 2008, a white dot flitted across the screen of Richard Kowalski's computer at an observatory atop Mount Lemmon in Arizona. Kowalski had seen hundreds of such dots during three and a half years of scanning telescope images for asteroids that might hit Earth or come close. He followed the object through the night and submitted the coordinates, as usual, to the Minor Planet Center in...