Predicted asteroid impact over Sudan happens

Neat. Predicted and observed. [Link]

Asteroids routinely hit the Earth's atmosphere but the impact by one over northern Africa Monday was the first time astronomers saw one coming and accurately predicted the time and place it would hit, a University of Hawaii astronomer said yesterday.

That successful prediction bodes well for a Maui-based system in development to warn against potentially hazardous space rocks, David Tholen said.

The impact occurred at 4:46 p.m. Hawaii time Monday over northern Sudan. A colleague compared the asteroid, called 2008 TC3, with the size of a Volkswagen, he said.

...

The Mount Lemon telescope of the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey first observed the object early Monday. The Near Earth Object Observation program, called Spaceguard, plots the orbits of these objects to determine if any is a threat to Earth.

Calculations by the University of Pisa in Italy were reported to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, located at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics — the worldwide clearinghouse for asteroid and comet observations.

JPL and the University of Pisa have software for impact calculations, but some amateurs did their own calculations, which were "remarkably consistent" with professional groups, Tholen said.