Discovered the first asteroid of 2014 - ANSA.it

‘was found on the night of January 1st, shortly before it entered the atmosphere: the first asteroid discovered in the year just begun, called the AA in 2014, is a small object with a diameter of between one and five meters and was destroyed on impact.
” Arguably, no fragment has reached the ground,” noted astrophysicist Gianluca Masi, head of the Virtual Telescope and scientific curator of the Planetarium of Rome. ” However – he adds – this asteroid is already famous because it is only the second time that a similar object is discovered shortly before entering the atmosphere.

” The first case – he continues – back to 2008 with the asteroid 2008 Tc3. Both were discovered by Richard Kowalski in the program Mout Lemmon Survey in Arizona.” They are very different cases dall’asteroide Chelyabinsk, that no one had seen approaching the Earth.
2014 AA was discovered on the night of January 1, while all the telescopes were pointed toward another asteroid 2013 YL2, which now reach the minimum distance from the Earth. ” AA 2014 was discovered around 7 am Italian first January, while the entry into the atmosphere would have happened almost 24 hours later, with a margin of error of about 10 hours,” says Masi.

According to preliminary calculations, performed by Bill Gray, the Minor Planet Center of the United States, and Steve Chesley, of the program on Neo (Near-Earth Object) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA, the impact could be occurred over a very large region, extending between Central America and the east coast of Africa. In the unlikely event that the fragments had survived the impact, would have fallen off the west coast of Africa.