Scout determined that 2022 EB5 would enter the atmosphere southwest of Jan Mayen, a Norwegian island nearly 300 miles (470 kilometers) off the east coast of Greenland and northeast of Iceland. “As more observatories tracked the asteroid, our calculations of its trajectory and impact location became more precise.” We were able to determine the possible impact locations, which initially extended from western Greenland to off the coast of Norway,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at JPL who developed Scout. “Scout had only 14 observations over 40 minutes from one observatory to work with when it first identified the object as an impactor. CNEOS calculates every known near-Earth asteroid orbit to improve impact hazard assessments in support of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. Maintained by CNEOS at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Scout automatically searches the Minor Planet Center’s database for possible new short-term impactors. As soon as Scout determined that 2022 EB5 was going to hit Earth’s atmosphere, the system alerted the Center for Near Earth Object Studies ( CNEOS) and NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, and flagged the object on the Scout webpage to notify the near-Earth object observing community. NASA’s “Scout” impact hazard assessment system then took these early measurements to calculate the trajectory of 2022 EB5. The object was posted on the Minor Planet Center’s Near-Earth Object Confirmation Page to flag it for additional observations that would confirm it as a previously unknown asteroid. Sarneczky at the Piszkéstető Observatory in northern Hungary first reported observations of the small object to the Minor Planet Center – the internationally recognized clearinghouse for the position measurements of small celestial bodies. Two hours before the asteroid made impact, K. But this event wasn’t a complete surprise: Astronomers knew it was on a collision course, predicting exactly where and when the impact would happen. A small asteroid hit Earth’s atmosphere over the Norwegian Sea before disintegrating on March 11, 2022.
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