NASA detects asteroid heading for Earth

NASA's global defence system used to detect potentially hazardous objects heading towards Earth has located an asteroid heading for our planet.

Dubbed COWECP5 by scientists monitoring the space rock, it is set to enter Earth's atmosphere shortly after 4pm today (3 December).

Thankfully the rock is tiny - just 27 inches wide, to be precise. But despite its size, the asteroid is still set to light up the skies when it enters the atmosphere.

Sadly, it won't be visible for many, with the European Space Agency (ESA) predicting it to burn up over the skies of Siberia in northern Russia.

This will happen at 11.15pm local time, which is 4.15pm GMT. Those within a few hundred kilometres of the entry point should be able to see a 'very bright fireball' light up the sky.

The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, designed and used by NASA and affectionately dubbed ATLAS, spotted the potential threat.

ATLAS can spot asteroids up to one week before they arrive on Earth, giving scientists time to respond if necessary.

With COWECP5, the asteroid was spotted by ATLAS just seven hours before it was going to hit Earth.

The Kitt Peak National Observatory, funded by NASA, also tracked the asteroid early on Tuesday.

Richard Moissl, the head of planetary defense office with the ESA, said the Kitt Peak system had calculated the asteroid's 'impact corridor'.

Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, at Queen’s University Belfast, said the ability to detect this asteroid shows that humanity's ability to protect itself from objects in space is getting stronger by the year.

“It’s a small one, but it will still be quite spectacular,” Fitzsimmons said. "It will be dark over the impact site and for several hundreds of kilometres around there’ll be a very impressive, very bright fireball in the sky.”

The first ever asteroid to be monitored being hitting Earth was tracked back in 2008. As a result, parts of the rock were recovered by scientists to study.

Fitzsimmons explained: "The beauty there was that the reflectivity of the meteorites exactly matched the reflectivity as measured by telescopes before it hit, showing you that really nice direct link between what we saw out there in space and what we then found later on, on the ground."

The ATLAS system used to track this asteroid uses four telescopes that are dotted across the globe.

For future collisions, one 2017 study determined that an asteroid needs to be at least 60 feet wide to have any potentially lethal impacts for humanity. Let's hope we never find one heading our way.