Thursday, October 16, 2008

More images and news of UA's asteroid impact


Emily at the Planetary Society posted a picture from Meteosat-8 that captured the fireball from asteroid 2008 TC3 impacting the Earth's atmosphere [right, the caption from Emily's post said, "At 02:45:47 UTC on October 7, 2008, the first near-Earth asteroid to have been discovered before it hit Earth entered the atmosphere over northern Sudan. The flare of heat given off by the asteroid's passage through the atmosphere was recorded by the geostationary weather satellite METEOSAT-8. Credit: EUMETSAT"].

Emily also posted another image of the fireball from EUMETSAT.

Then Chuck at Lounge of the Lab Lemming blog imported it into Google Earth and plotted the location where you should go to look for any of the meteorite that might have survived and made it to the ground.

The UA Mt. Lemmon observatory first spotted the body in space and predicted it's time and location of impact, which was dead on.