A newly discovered asteroid has met a colorful and spectacular end above the Philippines, exploding in a bright green fireball that was visible for hundreds of miles. The space rock was only discovered earlier the same day, earning it a spot in an extremely exclusive club.
Astronomers from the Catalina Sky Survey discovered the roughly 3-foot-wide (1 meter) space rock, named 2024 RW1 in the early hours of Wednesday (Sept. 4), the European Space Agency (ESA) said in a post on the social platform X . The Catalina Sky Survey is a NASA-funded project at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory near Tucson, which scans the skies for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.
