Caught on Camera: Asteroid Fireball Explodes Over Siberia

A small asteroid hit Earth’s atmosphere in the early hours of this morning, producing a spectacular explosion in the night skies over far eastern Russia.

The blazing white fireball reached speeds of 3,500 miles per hour above the Sakha Republic. However, it had been spotted by the European Space Agency (ESA) a few hours before.

“A small asteroid has just been spotted on a collision course with Earth,” wrote the ESA. “At around 70 centimeters in diameter, the impact will be harmless, likely producing a nice fireball in the sky over northern Siberia around seven hours from now.”

Residents in Siberia captured the moment the asteroid appeared above them, violently flashing as it burned up before extinguishing. It’s only the 11th time an asteroid has been spotted before entering Earth’s atmosphere.

“It was a possibility to test the system, make sure that we can compute all the numbers, predict the exact location, and confirm those predictions with the spectacular videos,” Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tells NBC News.

Farnocchia says scientists have gotten much better and much faster at recognizing when an asteroid is on a collision course with Earth which will only improve when instruments like the Vera Rubin Observatory comes online.

Asteroid Defense

The fear that a large asteroid could impact Earth and cause devastating consequences is a real one. Farnocchia says that one of the best plans space agencies like NASA have right now is to detect an asteroid early and make a kinetic impact on it.

NASA tested this in 2022 (see above) with its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) which successfully crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, altering its course.