Astronomers discovered the small asteroid just hours before it entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned into a fireball on February 13.

Expert Krisztián Sárneczky detected a small asteroid from the Piszkéstető Station of the Konkoly Observatory, Hungary, with a 0.6 m telescope. The information was transferred to the European Space Agency (ESA), just a few hours before this asteroid plunged into the atmosphere around 3am on February 13 local time (10am Hanoi time). The asteroid caught fire and became a fireball that lit up the sky above the English Channel.

“I spotted this small object during my daily near-Earth object (NEO) hunt. I knew immediately that this was a NEO. It wasn’t moving too fast in the sky, it was heading straight for us. and it looks pretty blurry,” says Sárneczky. The newly discovered asteroid is named Sar 2667.

This is not the first time Sárneczky has issued an early warning about the fireball. This professional asteroid hunter did the same thing in March 2022.

Sar 2667 fell almost exactly 10 years after an asteroid about 18 meters wide suddenly exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15, 2013. The shock wave from the explosion shattered windows in six cities and left 1,500 people in need of medical attention. Back then, the world’s space agencies reaffirmed their commitment to tracking such objects. NASA also established a Planetary Defense Coordination Office following the event.

Most fireballs are harmless and rarely have shards falling to the ground. However, NASA, ESA and many other organizations still monitor the sky 24/7 to detect any asteroids approaching Earth’s orbit. Nothing seriously threatens the blue planet through decades of observations, but they continue to work on prevention.

The discovery of Sar 2667 a few hours before it hit Earth is the seventh time astronomers have made in the history of asteroid tracking, according to ESA. “It is a sign that global detection has made rapid progress,” the agency wrote on Twitter.