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| Small 6 feet asteroid was burned and consumed in the sky before it could hit the earth |
A small 6 feet asteroid determined to head for Earth was discovered just a few hours before it hit the earth's atmosphere on Saturday morning.
It was named asteroid 2018 LA (and previously listed as ZLAF9B2), was estimated to be only about 6 feet (2 meters) across. It was first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona.
"The discovery of asteroid 2018 LA is only the third time that an asteroid has been discovered to be on an impact trajectory," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), in a statement.
"It is also only the second time that the impact location was predicted well ahead of the event itself."
All three asteroids burned up in the atmosphere and caused no reported damage.
NEO watchers calculated that asteroid 2018 LA would enter the atmosphere somewhere over a corridor extending from Africa across the Indian Ocean to Papua New Guinea.
The final moments of the asteroid's existence appear to have been caught Saturday evening from a webcam in South Africa in the below clip.
Although it looks like the fireball impacts the ground, it is really just disappearing over the horizon. NASA says it disintegrated several miles over the surface as it lit up the sky