Little asteroid blazes through our atmosphere

Cool thing happened on my birthday in 2008. Too bad I don't really believe that mere time relationships such as this mean something. However, I am not a total bore -- darn fun to imagine that it means something important for me! If you will, check out the full story using the link. A small asteroid came into earth's atmosphere. A bit creepy, huh?

SkyandTelescope.com - Homepage News - Little Asteroid Makes a Big Splash

The world's astronomers kicked into high gear, amassing 570 observations between the space rock's discovery until it slipped into Earth's shadow about an hour before impact. All that in just 19 hours! My email in box was lit up like a Christmas tree! As the observations piled up, dynamicists at JPL boldly announced that the mini-asteroid would slam into Earth at 2:46 Universal Time on October 7th. Ground zero was somewhere over northern Sudan — and at night! For anyone in that part of northeast Africa, it was going to be quite a show.

So what happened? The impact did occur as predicted, but so far there's no confirmation that anyone on the ground saw it. S&T contributing editor Johnny Horne, who's a photographer for the Fayetteville Observer, received a negative report from Khartoum, Sudan's capital. Khartoum and Mecca are the closest significant cities to the impact site, but each is still roughly 300 miles away. This part of the world is exceedingly arid and sparsely populated — people living there have far bigger issues on their minds.

The bigger issues? Village annihilations, reported genocidal madness and such. Darfur - familiar with it? Read a little here.

See, this is interesting in one sense: my wife was born on the day that astronauts first made way for the Moon, as Apollo 11 crewmates. So the asteroid that happened to arrive on my birthday, yeah, not as interesting. Nevermind.


- Jonny O

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