Tiny asteroid's earthly fireworks predicted with pinpoint accuracy by NASA

A NASA system has accurately predicted where and when an asteroid entered the Earth's atmosphere. The asteroid in question, 2024 BX1, was only a meter in size and disintegrated harmlessly over Germany on January 21. Still, NASA's Scout impact hazard assessment system was able to give advance warning on where and when the …

[ThatOne]

> 2024 BX1 was spotted less than three hours before impact

Did I miss something? This is marginally more useful than "was spotted on impact".

_{All right, that was a tiny one, bigger and more dangerous ones would probably get spotted more hours before impact, but still not enough to do something about it.}

[Anonymous Coward]

"Did I miss something?"

Yes -- the article's last three paragraphs.

[Pascal Monett]

Given that large asteroids have already only been spotted after passing Earth, the question is not entirely without merit.

Given that we still can't do anything about it, one can only wonder if the question is worth asking . . .

[Eclectic Man]

Warnings can be useful

Also, in the event that some of the material impacts the ground, it will give scientists as much warning as possible to get ready to retrieve samples before too much contamination occurs. With more warning, a larger body predicted to impact a populated area there could be effective evacuation procedures.

[jmch]

Even considering the last 3 paragraphs, the point still stands that a 3-hour warning isn't much. An asteroid big enough to cause significant damage (enough to prompt evacuation of an area) would need a day or 2 advance warning for evacuation of the predicted impact site and impact preparation for surrounding areas. And asteroids big enough to cause significant damage are still tiny, tiny objects compared even to the size of the Earth, let alone the vast vast vastness of space even in our tiny corner of the solar system. So, yeah, current systems aren't yet good enough to give a lot of advanced warning, and given the nature of the problem, might continue to not be good enough for a very long time. But any little advance like this one helps to improve the early-warning systems.

Of course any proper big f***er of an asteroid - Manson or Chicxulub-size, and any advance warning will just be enough time to kiss your arse goodbye

[Bill Gray]

As noted, there are several benefits. We test out our ability to gather tracking data quickly to figure out where and when the object is going to hit. For small objects (all we've seen so far), we can tell people when to step outside and see a bright meteor. (Those images were taken by an amateur astronomer who got the first measurements for the object after the discover.)

For a bigger object -- say, the ~17-m diameter one that hit Chelyabinsk a while back -- we can get more warning and tell people to crack open their windows. (Most of the injuries from Chelyabinsk were from shattered glass.) Unfortunately, the Chelyabinsk rock came from the direction of the sun, resulting in a grand total of zero minutes of warning. We do, at present, miss most of these objects. Though until 2008, we'd missed 100% of them.

For a still bigger object -- say, one large enough to survive going through the upper atmosphere and big enough to damage a town or city -- we get a few days or weeks of warning, and can say : crack open your windows and maybe you should just arrange to be someplace else when it hits. The time and latitude/longitude of impact will be very precisely known, to within dozens of meters and a fraction of a second.

[Sceptic Tank]

Thought I too. 3 Hours isn't exactly a lot of lead time to evacuate West Berlin before the big event.

[ThatOne]

Three hours is not even enough time to inform the decision makers, so they can quit whatever they were doing right then and start wondering if/what they should/could do about the incoming meteorite.

That was my point.

I agree technology progresses, and that was a tiny, hard to spot meteorite, not some big life-threatening boulder, but I still think the panegyrics are a little undeserved yet. We can start congratulating ourselves when we start being able to pinpoint impact times and locations many days* in advance. Not before.

_{* Consider 1 day at least for the information to make it to the decision makers, and for them to pull out their fingers and figure they need to do something. And then they will start forming committees, make phone calls, querying their legal advisors and any hastily found "experts" (and so on), for this isn't an event governments have standard procedures for. Count at least another day lost wondering the pros and cons of doing/not doing something, emitting sound bites and making sure whatever happens won't affect them. And even after a decision to evacuate has been taken, recent hurricanes in the USA are a good example of how much time it takes to actually evacuate any bigger population, even in a supposedly rich and well-organized country.}

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is a comma missing between 'doing' and 'right' in the first line....

[Claptrap314]

Yes, we are the richest country. We are also, by design, one of the least well-organized.

“The reason that the American Navy does so well in wartime is that war is chaos, and the Americans practice chaos on a daily basis.”

― Karl Dönitz

One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine, is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine…

– From a Soviet Junior Lt’s Notebook

Of course, this went rather horribly for us during COVID, but you take the bad with the good.

And I would argue that a major reason we are the richest is _because_ we are so poorly organized. Central planning performs extremely poorly under almost all circumstances. Of course, for most of our history, we've been a haven for non-conformists as wel...

[Crypto Monad]

Three hours is plenty of time to get into your basement, for example. Not that you'd even need to do that in this case.

Larger rocks => more danger but longer warning.

[Bill Gray]

Not just NASA

To give due credit, ESA's Meerkat system also monitors for impacts and predicted this one. And I think the first public mention that this would be impacting was here, on the Minor Planet Mailing List, rather than from either of these services. That post was important for notifying amateur observers throughout Europe, about a dozen of whom dropped the objects they'd been observing and switched to this one. They supplied the bulk of the tracking data... in fact, looking through the list of observatories that tracked the object, I don't think any of the follow-up tracking was done by professional observers (except by Krisztián Sárneczky, the gent in Hungary who discovered it). Those amateurs are the reason we knew exactly where and when it would come in.

A big reason these small impactors matter is that sometimes, meteorites are found. We can see lots of rocks in the sky and have collected plenty on the ground, but you aren't often able to associate one with the other. Three out of four go into the water. For this one, meteorites west of Berlin have already been found. (Warning, it's a Faecebook link. I was able to look at it without a FB account, though.) I'd think if they found some this quickly, more bits will be found.