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Great Balls of Fire
from Nature News
A space rock a few metres across exploded over northern Sudan early in the morning of Tuesday 7 October. The small asteroid mostly disintegrated when it collided with Earth's atmosphere, but fragments may have reached the surface.
Such an event happens roughly every three months. But this is "the first time we were able to discover and predict an impact before the event," says Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object (NEO) programme at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
The story began on Sunday evening, when astronomers with the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona, discovered the incoming object, dubbed 2008 TC3. By the next morning, three organizations—NASA's NEO office, the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and NeoDys in Pisa, Italy—confirmed that the asteroid was racing towards Earth.
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