Asteroid 2023 CX1 Just Collided With Earth (And That Brings Good News)

At 2:59 UTC (3:59 Spanish time) on February 13, 2023, a huge fireball lit up the sky over the English Channel between England and France. And although we are used to hearing or reading catastrophic and unsubstantiated news about asteroids moving in a direct collision course with our planet, this did not happen. Vice versa.

The danger inherent in these stony or stony bodies depends mainly on their size, and most of those that reach the Earth during a person’s lifetime are small. Rather, the discovery of 2023 CX1 can be interpreted as a success for the asteroid tracking program, one of the greatest examples of international scientific collaboration between professional and amateur astronomers.

Discovered six hours before “death”

2023 CX1 was discovered by astronomer Christian Sarniecki from the Piskesteto astronomical station, located in the Matra Mountains, about 80 kilometers northeast of Budapest, Hungary. This is the second asteroid that this scientific infrastructure, which belongs to the famous Concoli Observatory, discovered shortly before the collision with the Earth.

This location of the space rock occurred on the night of February 12 at 20:40 UTC and was confirmed about an hour later by the Vishnjan Observatory in Croatia. 2023 CX1 was the seventh asteroid discovered prior to impact with our planet.

Therefore, when we found this object with a diameter of just over a meter, he had only six hours to live. Although this time may seem short to us, it is extremely valuable. Having penetrated the atmosphere at superspeed (in particular, at a speed of 17.4 km / s), the ablation of the rock in the atmosphere led to the formation of a column of ionized gas. This luminous phase, exceeding the intermediate luminosity between the full Moon and the Sun, is called a superbolide. Its luminosity was such that we were even able to photograph it from the Astronomical Observatory of Monsec, almost 900 km away.

“Small” rock weighing 12 tons

It should be remembered that the rock that broke open on February 13 over France was an unknown near-Earth asteroid until yesterday. Taking into account the average density of the most common meteorites that reach our planet, called ordinary chondrites, their mass before entering the atmosphere will be about 12 tons. Its Apollo type orbit brought it into direct collision with the Earth, as we can see in the following figure.

The discovery of small asteroids like this comes at a particularly important time for our scientific community. Immediately after NASA’s DART mission, which launched active planetary defense, we found that detecting them before they hit our planet was already commonplace.

Impressive effects but without risk

For this reason, it is important that scientists commit themselves to bringing our science closer to the public. We should not look upon such sightings with fear, as asteroids of this size produce spectacular meteor showers at best. Objects with a diameter of less than a few tens of meters usually do not pose a danger: when rubbing with our atmosphere, they break up and lose on average more than 97% of their mass.

But the point is also that they teach us valuable lessons: the recovery and study of meteorites after impacts gives us, for free, valuable samples of materials and their physical properties. A better understanding of them will allow us to develop new methods to protect against visits to much larger asteroids.

At the limit of what would be a higher risk impact, we would have had the asteroid that produced the Chelyabinsk meteorite in Siberia ten years ago. As a result of this event, about 1,500 people were injured due to the shock wave, which could knock down walls and destroy windows, as well as radiation, which caused severe burns to observers who were closest to the fireball. In fact, this marked a turning point for us in creating International Asteroid Day, recognized by the United Nations.

So it’s good news that we can detect these small asteroids in time and have a few hours to warn the public in the event of an imminent impact. If we continue on this path and develop a planetary defense program using instruments from space, even larger asteroid detection initiatives will do the trick. In this way, we can facilitate future collisions with DART-type kinetic impactors so that they do not pose any risk.

Unfortunately, the scientific community does not have a solution on how to protect the human species from its destructive actions against itself and the planet on which it is located. We can only be saved by cooperation, trust and solidarity among peoples, which is what most scientists are inclined to practice.

Josep M. Trigo Rodriguez, Principal Investigator of the Meteorites, Small Bodies and Planets Group at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE – CSIC)

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.

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