Astronomer Teddy Kareta had spent countless nights over the years observing various objects across our solar system using Arizona's Lowell Discovery Telescope, or LDT. On Nov. 19, 2022, he set his alarm to ring shortly before midnight, in preparation for what he presumed would be a quiet observing night — and woke up to missed calls and messages from his boss. Those pings, he recalled, "more or less could be summarized as, 'Dude, you gotta get on the telescope right now! What are you doing? Pick up!'"
Just two hours before those calls, at 11:53 p.m. EST (04:53 GMT), asteroid-spotting telescopes in Arizona's Catalina Mountains had reported the discovery of a tiny but bright asteroid on a trajectory that took it northward over Arizona's clear, dark skies before leading it to a crash somewhere around Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, near the U.S.-Canada border.
