By A small asteroid is on a collision course with Earth today, but don’t worry. It will burn up harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere when it strikes, scientists say.
The European Space Agency (ESA) says a 3-foot (1-meter) asteroid will strike the atmosphere and burn up harmlessly on Wednesday (Sept. 4) around 12:46 p.m. ET (1646 GMT) above the western Pacific Ocean near Luzon Island in the Philippines.
The asteroid, known as 2024 RW1, was discovered today by research technologist Jacqueline Fazekas with the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded observatory near Tucson, Arizona dedicated to tracking and cataloging near-Earth objects. It is only the ninth asteroid that has been spotted prior to impact, ESA wrote in a post on X .
NASA’s Asteroid Watch website predicted that the impact could create a fireball visible from the east coast of the Philippines. Unfortunately, weather conditions could mean that the event isn’t visible from the ground.
“The nearby tropical storm Yagi/Enteng will make fireball observations difficult,” ESA wrote on X.
Planetary defense, which involves searching for near-Earth asteroids such as 2024 RW1 and cataloging them for tracking, has become a major priority for space agencies worldwide. In 2022, NASA’s DART mission crashed an impactor into a double asteroid system in an attempt to change its trajectory.
NASA is also planning a new infrared telescope known as NEO Surveyor, and China is developing its own mission to deflect an asteroid by 2030.
