Now Nasa has shown that it has the ability to spot objects just before they hit us, even though it has no way of deflecting comets or asteroids on a collision course with our planet. The space agency has released new details of the discovery of a mysterious flash in Earth’s atmosphere over the Carribean Sea on June 22.

The anomaly was spotted by a lightning detector on a weather satellite, drawing researchers’ attention. Upon further examination, it was revealed that the flash was actually caused by an asteroid speeding into our atmosphere. Astronomers combed through data from the University of Hawaii’s ATLAS survey telescope and discovered that Nasa’s planetary defence system actually spotted 310,000 miles from Earth – which is further away than the orbit of our Moon. This is ‘roughly the equivalent of spotting something the size of a gnat from a distance of 310 miles’. The object has now been named 2019 MO and was roughly 5 metres in size.

If it had been bigger, the object could have caused some serious damage and we would have no warning of an imminent impact ‘Asteroids this size are far smaller than what we’re tasked to track,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at the Nasa Center for Near Earth Object Studies. ‘They’re so small, they would not survive passing through our atmosphere to cause damage to Earth’s surface. But this event shows how capable our search programs are, even for objects of such small sizes.’

Read more:

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• Asteroid Day 2019 is June 30

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