Astronomers discovered the car-sized asteroid hours before it crashed into Earth and caught fire in the atmosphere over the weekend.
Scientists in Hawaii discovered the 2019 MO meteorite on June 22. Shortly after, it plunged into Earth, collided with the atmosphere and exploded in a giant fireball 380 km from the Puerto Rican capital, San Juan.
This is the fourth time in history that scientists have discovered an asteroid before it even approaches Earth. The three previous times were recorded in 2008 with the meteorites TC3, 2014 with AA and 2018 with LA. In the case of 2018, Los Angeles was discovered 7 hours before diving into southern Africa.
Unlike Los Angeles, Earth’s Last Uninvited Guest is harmless and even explodes without landing. However, the 5m long meteorite still created a fireball with a destructive power equivalent to 6,000 tons of TNT.
The impact of the explosion was so strong that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite recorded its destruction at 5:25 p.m. on July 1. At this point, MO 2019 is moving at a speed of 14.9 km / s.
The recent discovery of MO 2019 also recorded for the first time that two University of Hawaii research telescopes were effective at detecting signs of planets attacking Earth. It helps a lot in giving future warnings to minimize the consequences of an uninvited visit.
With a telescope, astronomers observed 2019 MO four times in less than 30 minutes, with the furthest time being 500,000 kilometers from Earth, 1.3 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.
With the first observations, scientists ranked it second on a four-level scale, which is equivalent to its inability to attack Earth. But when they get more data, they raise MO 2019 to level 4.
MO 2019 is much smaller than a 22 m long meteorite that exploded in the Krasnabinsk region of Russia in 2013. The energy of this explosion was then equivalent to 440,000 tonnes of TNT.
