A small asteroid about the size of two house cats burned up in the Earth's atmosphere, just over the Philippine island of Luzon on Wednesday, September 4, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) later confirmed.
The roughly one meter (3-foot) asteroid made impact at 12:39 p.m. ET (4:39 p.m. UTC).
The asteroid in question has been designated 2024 RW1, and did not cause damage.
Notably, asteroid 2024 RW1 is only the ninth-ever asteroid discovered by scientists before impacting Earth.
How big is the asteroid set to hit the Earth?
Asteroid 2024 RW1 was first discovered by Jacqueline Fazekas of the NASA-backed Catalina Sky Survey project, which announced the discovery over social media.
According to a later report by the ESA, the asteroid is only a meter in diameter.
To put that in perspective, let's compare it to a very ubiquitous animal: the house cat.
House cats vary in size, and while some experts put their maximum average length at around 81 centimeters from tail to snout, this reporter has personally met and petted many cats far longer, including my late cat Sprite, who sadly passed over the rainbow bridge three years ago.
As such, if we use that as a metric, we find that the asteroid set to impact over the Philippines to be around the size of two Sprite the cat, may he rest in peace.
Sprite was a rather hefty cat, colloquially known as a chonk, but this asteroid will likely be far heavier. However, it is unlikely to cause any damage. This is because the asteroid will almost certainly end up burning in the atmosphere, forming a fireball but not actually damaging anything on Earth.
This has been the case with previous asteroid impacts, such as the ones in recent years that impacted near Iceland, Normandy, Berlin, and more.
The fireball may be visible, provided the weather isn't too cloudy.
Can we defend against asteroid impacts?
While this asteroid impact didn't cause any damage, other impacts hold the potential to cause severe destruction.
As such, scientists in the field of planetary defense have been hard at work trying to find ways of averting any potential catastrophic impact events.
Initiatives like NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission hold promise in this regard, having been shown to be able to change the orbital path of asteroids. However, they still require considerable time to prepare and to launch before the asteroids get too close.