An asteroid has burned up in the earth’s atmosphere above eastern Siberia, giving residents in the town of Olyokminsk a front-row seat to a light show.
US scientists detected the object on Tuesday and named it COWECP5. It was estimated to be about a meter in size, though that was later revised down to about 70 centimeters.
The falling rock streaked above the Lena River in Yakutia on Tuesday evening, around 7pm Moscow time, with a bright flash in the sky visible for hundreds of kilometers.
The asteroid’s path took it right above the town of Olyokminsk, a community of around 10,000 residents some 650km southwest of Yakutsk.
“Is that it?” some local residents can be heard saying on videos posted on social media, as the rock burned up in the atmosphere.
The US space agency NASA said that COWECP5 was spotted by its Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), intended to provide up to a week’s notice of incoming space objects. In this case, the time between detection and impact was just seven hours.
Tuesday’s asteroid was the fourth to hit the atmosphere this year, but was small and posed no danger. According to a 2017 study, an object would need to be around 18 meters across to do serious damage.
The meteor that broke up above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 was 17-20 meters across. Its explosion caused a shockwave that shattered windows on the ground, injuring and inflicting burns to more than 1,000 people.