Asteroid hits earth! airline crew gets up close and personal sighting

Over at SpaceWeather.com (which is one of my favorite sites), they've been tracking the crash of an asteroid headed for Africa. And it turns out that they had one of the first sightings of the TNT-like explosion of the impact.

If predictions were correct, asteroid 2008 TC3 hit Earth this morning (Oct. 7th at 0246 UT), exploding in the atmosphere over northern Sudan like a kiloton of TNT and creating a fireball as bright as a full Moon. Most of the 3-meter-wide asteroid would have vaporized in the atmosphere with only small pieces possibly reaching the ground as meteorites.

The following potentially confirming report comes from  Jacob Kuiper,  General Aviation meteorologist at the National Weather Service in the Netherlands: "Half an hour before the predicted impact of asteroid 2008 TC3, I informed an official of Air-France-KLM at Amsterdam airport about the possibility that crews of their airliners in the vicinity of impact would have a chance to see a fireball.

And it was a success! I have received confirmation that a KLM airliner, roughly 750 nautical miles southwest of the predicted atmospheric impact position, has observed a short flash just before the expected impact time 0246 UTC. Because of the distance it was not a very large phenomenon, but still a confirmation that some bright meteor has been seen in the predicted direction. Projected on  an infrared satellite-image of Meteosat-7 of 0300 UTC, I have indicated the position of the plane (+) and the predicted impact area in Sudan (0)."

Wow. How cool is that? To be flying throuigh an impact zone for an asteroid and get to see it hit--very cool.

Yesterday, I reported that the prediction of the asteroid, which was several feet in diameter, had been made by NASA's Near Earth Object program.  It's the first time that an asteroid bombing has been predicted in advance.

"We estimate objects this size enter Earth's atmosphere once every few months," said Don Yeomans of the Near-Earth Object Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The unique aspect of this event is that it is the first time we have observed an impacting object during its final approach."

...The small space rock first was observed by the Mount Lemmon telescope of the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey early Monday and reported to the Minor Planet Center for initial orbit determination. The Minor Planet Center alerted NASA and JPL of the impact potential. NASA detects and tracks asteroids and comets passing close to Earth. The Near Earth Object Observation Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," plots the orbits of these objects to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.

The image of 2008 TC3, the asteroid's formal name, is from  Richard Kowalski and Ed Beshore, Catalina Sky Survey.
 

In honor of the event, here's a getcha up and going presentation of the Killer himself, Jerry Lee Lewis, with "Great Balls of Fire." Rock on astronomers and scientists!