Looking up at the Arizona sky from the Catalina Sky Survey on Mount Lemmon, Richard A. Kowalski discovered a small meteoroid later designated 2008 TC3. A small celestial body at only between seven and sixteen feet, it was predicted to impact the Earth on October 7, 2008, and so it did in the deserts of northern Sudan. The object was discovered 20 hours before impact, and for 19 hours prior to its final explosion, it would be surveyed by 26 different observatories. Amateur and expert astronomers banded together to collect 570 observations in the crushed time limit given to them by space. The object’s trajectory was predicted by the University of Pisa’s CLOMON 2 semi-automatic monitoring system and the Sentry system operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Detection of the Meteroid
The 80-tonne meteoroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 27,700 mph before exploding 23 miles above the Nubian Desert. US satellites detected the explosion on all 12 of their spectral channels. 2008 TC3’s atmospheric explosion caused a 51-mile-long fireball that was visible for merely five minutes.
Aside from various imaging of the fireball caused by the asteroid and measurements taken during its entry into the atmosphere, the only first-hand visual confirmation of its arrival was made by an airliner. The northern areas of Sudan near the Egyptian border are remotely populated. While passing approximately 750 nautical miles from the predicted impact site, an Air-France-KLM aircraft witnessed a short flash.
The meteoroid had an energy of between 0.9 and 2.1 kilotons of TNT, which corresponds to measurements taken by an infrasound detector in Kenya, which reported a sound wave equivalent to between 1.1 and 2.1 kilotons of TNT.
Meteroid Debris Found
After 2008 TC3 struck the Earth, a search was conducted at the impact site in December 2008. This investigation was conducted by Peter Jenniskens, Muawia Shaddad and students from the University of Khartoum in Sudan and turned up 11 pounds of material consisting of 280 fragments of ureilite-type meteorites. They collection contained amino acids and nanodiamonds. The presence of amino acids in the 2008 TC3 aided a better understanding of the formation of amino acids in space, including insight into sparks of life that may have occurred in Earth’s past.
Sources:
- “Impact of Asteroid 2008 TC3 Confirmed”. NASA. Retrieved October 23, 2011.
- “NASA Team Finds Riches in Meteorite Treasure Hunt”. NASA. Retrieved 23, 2011.
- “Asteroid 2008 TC3 Strikes Earth: Observations and Predictions Agree”. NASA. Retrieved October 23, 2011.
