06-October-2008, 11:19 PM
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Order of Kilopi
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 13,364
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Planetary Society Weblog: A three-meter-diameter piece of the sky is falling
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Objects of this size hit Earth a few times a year, but no one has ever spotted one on the way in before, so, kudos to Kowalski et al. The fact that it's been predicted allows astronomers, both professional and amateur, to study the color of the asteroid as it approaches. Then, if there are any appropriately instrumented observers in the right place (I don't know how many well-equipped astronomers there are in Sudan), they could capture spectra of the fireball, which would tell them volumes about what the asteroid was made of. If, by some chance, any pieces survive to hit the ground and get recovered (a very, very unlikely scenario, but it could happen), we could actually study the body's composition in a third way, with real hand samples. That would be an unprecedented data set on asteroids, helping to tie what we've learned from meteorites found on Earth to what we've learned from studying their light from space.
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