Asteroid Watchers Score a Hit

By Richard A. Kerr ScienceNOW Daily News Two days ago, Science reported that astronomers were predicting an asteroid impact for the first time (ScienceNOW , 6 October). Chalk one up for the astronomers. "The prediction clearly was correct," says planetary scientist David Morrison of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. First detected on 5 October at the University of Arizona's Mt. Lemmon Observatory, the asteroid was calculated to enter the atmosphere over Sudan early on the morning of 7 October, erupting into a fireball in the sky but not damaging the ground. Although no sightings of the 2- to 3-meter-diameter rock burning itself up have come in from the ground, two other sorts of detections--one human and one instrumental--were made. Aviation meteorologist Jacob Kuiper of the National Weather Service in... [read full story]