Asteroid burns up in the atmosphere not far from Berlin

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Photo: Christzoph Seidler

For Richard Moissl, the night from Saturday to Sunday ended at exactly 11:36 p.m.

The physicist heads the department for protecting the planet from asteroid impacts at the European Space Agency (Esa) in Frascati near Rome.

And whenever a chunk of space comes dangerously close to our Earth, a monitoring system called “Meerkat” sends an alarm to Moissl’s cell phone.

Even if the probability of an impact is only one percent, the ESA expert and his team are notified.

But in this case it quickly became clear that there would actually be a hit: "It quickly went to 100 percent," says Moissl in an interview with SPIEGEL.

It was the Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky who was the first to discover the previously unknown small celestial body on Saturday evening.

Sárneczky is a legend in his field, having discovered more than 360 asteroids.

A celestial body, spotted decades earlier by a fellow countryman, has even had his name since 2017: (10258) Sárneczky.

It was clear from the start: Sar2736, the first, provisional name of the newly discovered cosmic ghost rider, would not pose a threat to life on Earth.

The body, whose diameter was estimated to be around one meter, was far too small for that.

But it was likely that he would say goodbye with a spectacular show.

After examining the data, the responsible Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adopted the asteroid into its catalog under the name 2024BX1.

The initial calculations suggested that the incoming chunk would disintegrate at 12:32 a.m. somewhere west of Berlin.

And the spectacle could actually be seen in the starry sky of the capital: exactly at the pre-calculated time, the asteroid entered the atmosphere not far from the moon at a steep angle - as a glowing ball with a speed of several kilometers per second.

The glow could also be seen from a greater distance, with webcams in Leipzig and Prague recording the phenomenon.

The body finally broke apart in the increasingly dense atmosphere.

“Meteorites could possibly have been formed due to the relatively low entry speed,” says expert Moissl.

This means that some fragments of the bolide, which originally weighed several tons, could have reached the earth's surface.

Groups of people interested in astro are expected to head to Havelland by Sunday at the latest to look for them.

Similar discoveries were made last spring when a meteorite the size of a tennis ball hit a residential building in Elmshorn, Schleswig-Holstein.

The vast majority of collisions go undetected

Actually, our Earth is constantly hit by objects of this size - according to expert estimates, between 40 and 100 tons of material from space reach the planet every day.

Most of the time they are small particles that, at best, appear as shooting stars.

But even if the chunks are larger, the collisions almost always go completely unnoticed, also because the earth's surface consists of more than 70 percent water.

In fact, it was only the eighth time ever that an asteroid's entry into Earth's atmosphere was successfully predicted.

The first time this happened was when a chunk measuring around four meters exploded over Sudan in October 2008.

At that time, at least 600 fragments with a total weight of more than ten kilograms were subsequently recovered.

The Hungarian Sárneczky alone accounted for three other successful asteroid predictions, including those from early Sunday morning.

“It’s crazy what he’s doing,” says Esa man Moissl.

Sárneczky has used the 60 cm Schmidt telescope at the Piszkéstető Observatory for his observations so far.

This observatory is operated by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and is located in the Mátra Mountains, around 90 kilometers from Budapest.

Esa is currently launching its own telescope for asteroid searches.

It is called Flyeye, and is established on Monte Mufara in Sicily.

It owes its name to the fact that its field of vision will consist of 16 individual images, which is reminiscent of the compound eye of an insect.

This is intended to achieve the largest possible observation field.

Every two days you want to completely scan the northern sky.

Around 1.3 million asteroids are known

This type of asteroid search is primarily about small, previously unknown specimens.

The larger the celestial bodies are, the more likely it is that they have been noticed in previous celestial surveys.

More than 1.3 million asteroids can therefore be found in global databases.

The vast majority of them have been making their rounds between Mars and Jupiter for 4.5 billion years.

They are not dangerous to our earth.

But around 1,000 asteroids are on a special watch list.

Although there is currently no candidate with a serious threat potential, one would like to keep an eye on them - because the orbits are constantly subject to fluctuations due to the gravitational effects of other celestial bodies.

And even comparatively small asteroids can cause serious damage to Earth - like the one that broke up in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15, 2013.

The pressure wave caused countless windows in the city's buildings to break and around 1,500 people were injured.

In the meantime, humanity would still be defenseless against a larger asteroid on a crash course with our Earth.

But the test of defense techniques is ongoing: In September 2022, the US space agency Nasa's “Dart” probe struck a small celestial body called Dimorphos in the system of the double asteroid Didymos.

It became apparent that its path could be noticeably changed by the deliberately induced collision.

ESA asteroid mission starts this year

The hope is therefore that the principle could also be applied to a significantly massive celestial body that could be dangerous to our Earth - by pushing it more or less gently onto a slightly different orbit with as much advance time as possible.

But a lot of research is still needed.

In order to check the effectiveness of the “Dart” mission, precise data on the mass of Didymos is currently missing.

These are to be derived from observations from another probe that is scheduled to launch this fall.

Her name is “Hera” and she comes from Esa.

However, the cube-shaped spacecraft is currently still in a huge test chamber at the Estec technology center in the Netherlands.

Like other satellites, it will be tested under space conditions so that it can complete its mission as planned.

2024BX1 and its fiery end have once again highlighted how important it is to observe asteroids - because a collision does not always have as few consequences as in this case.