An asteroid has burned up in a spectacular fireball in Yakutia, northeastern Asiatic Russia. The celestial body was not discovered until about twelve hours before it entered Earth’s atmosphere.
On Wednesday evening at 7:15 PM local time (5:15 PM CET), the approximately 70 centimeter asteroid with the catalog name C0WEPC5 hit the Earth’s atmosphere above Siberia at a speed of 16 meters per second (about 57,600 kilometers per hour). and created a glowing fireball. It had been discovered only a few hours earlier by astronomers at the Kitt Peak Observatory in the US state of Arizona.
ESA announced “beautiful fireball”.
The European Space Agency (ESA) had previously reported on X (formerly Twitter) that the cosmic rock would produce “a nice fireball” over northern Siberia. Data from around the world allowed the asteroid’s trajectory to be accurately predicted.
About 1.3 million asteroids are known
Space agencies are currently aware of approximately 1.3 million asteroids. The scenarios for the next 100 years are played out again and again for the approximately 35,000 currently known fragments of the near Earth.
Source: Krone
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