Weather Eye: Nasa spots asteroid before annihilation

In the early hours of yesterday morning a fireball exploded with the equivalent of a thousand tonnes of TNT over northern Sudan. The light was so intense that it lit up the sky like a full moon and an airliner 1,400km (870 miles) away reported seeing the bright flash. The explosion was caused by an asteroid the size of a boulder roughly three metres (10ft) across. It sounds catastrophic, but the rock was totally annihilated as it smashed into the atmosphere, and there was no chance of it hitting the ground. In fact, asteroids this size hit the Earth’s atmosphere every few months or so. But this particular event was special because the asteroid was spotted before it blew up, the first time this has been achieved. The asteroid was seen by astronomers on Sunday at an observatory in Arizona, as part of... [read full story]