Refrigerator-Size Asteroid Detected Less Than Two Hours Before Impacting Earth's Atmosphere

The small asteroid—dubbed 2022 EB5—is projected to have caused a fireball, or shooting star, after entering Earth’s atmosphere just north of Iceland, around 21:22 UTC on March 11.

Experts have estimated that the asteroid was traveling at a speed of approximately 11.5 miles per second (18.5 kilometers per second), which, at that size, would cause the asteroid to be vaporized during its passage into Earth’s atmosphere.

Eyewitnesses near the northern Iceland town of Akureyri observed bright blue flashes in the sky, according to social media accounts cited by the International Meteor Organization (IMO).

The small asteroid’s fiery trail was identified by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky less than two hours before it impacted the atmosphere.

Sárneczky’s discovery is the fifth asteroid to be detected just before it enters Earth's atmosphere.

Prior discoveries, all of which have occurred in the past 15 years, include: 2008 TC3, 2014 AA, 2018 LA, and 2019 MO, which generated five kilotons of TNT-equivalent explosion off the coast of Puerto Rico on June 22, 2019.

Those around Iceland and Norway have been asked to provide personal accounts of the 2022 EB5 event to the IMO.

Norway-based sensors monitoring nuclear detonations picked up the asteroid’s impact on the atmosphere, determining that the event’s resulting air burst had an energy release comparable to approximately 2,000 tons of TNT, according to Peter Brown, an astronomer at Western University in Ontario, Canada.