Meteorites from 2008 TC3 still giving up their secrets
Tuesday, November 1, 2011 - 08:30
in Astronomy & Space
It was an unprecedented event: On October 6, 2008, asteroid 2008 TC3 was spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey Telescope in Arizona. Plotting its trajectory, astronomers knew the 80-ton rock was heading for a collision course with Earth. Just 19 hours later, 2008 TC3 streaked over skies of northern Sudan and then exploded about 37 km above the Nubian Desert. This was the first time an asteroid was predicted and predicted correctly to impact Earth. Luckily, it wasnt big enough to cause any problems, and its path brought it over a remote area. But this presented scientists with an exciting and unparalleled opportunity to possibly study fragments of an asteroid that had been spectrally classified before striking Earth.