Lucky scientists accurately track inbound asteroid

by Stevie Smith - Mar 26 2009, 16:45

With so few stargazing scientists actively attempting to search the skies for meteors and asteroids heading for a collision with Earth, chances of success are unsurprisingly slim when it comes to finding and tracking an inbound chunk of space rock on its journey to the planet’s surface. However, that’s exactly what happened at the tail end of 2008.

More pointedly, the high-powered Catalina Sky Survey telescope in Arizona stumbled across a car-sized asteroid in October of last year, less than two days ahead of its certain collision.

The resultant window of scientific opportunity, although short, allowed astronomers to not only track the asteroid’s Earthly course but also accurately chart its point of impact some 19 hours later.

“It just so happened that the asteroid was coming from the direction that the telescope was pointed in,” explained astronomer and study co-author Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in a Science News report.

Subsequently dubbed TC³, the small asteroid hurtled onward and exploded in the atmosphere with a force equivalent to that of a small nuclear blast, dazzling onlookers with a huge fireball and raining a wealth of debris fragments onto the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan.

Visited by eager researchers soon thereafter as a result of the precise tracking, Jenniskens and some 45 students and staff from the University of Khartoum were able to comb the impact site, which resulted in the retrieval of 47 blackened meteorite fragments.

Following laboratory examination of the meteorite pieces, scientists revealed the asteroid to be of the rare F-class variety, linking it to an area of space where such objects had only previously been observed at extreme distance.

According to Jenniskens and fellow study author Mark Boslough of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, the asteroid was equally as rare insofar as it fell within the ureilite category – the first time that F-class asteroids and ureilites had been linked in the same find.

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