NASA has discovered an asteroid which was heading straight to earth but broke into pieces before making the final impact. The asteroid was discovered on Saturday by researchers who calculated its trajectory and informed that it will hit earth. The webcam footage of the asteroid captured in a rural area of Johannesburg showed that the asteroid was a glowing orb and lighted up the sky in a huge flash.
NASA dubbed the asteroid in 2018 LA and predicted that it will make its entry in an area somewhere over Southern Africa and across the Indian Ocean to New Guinea. Lindley Johnson, an official at NASA Planetary Defense system described the planetary defence team’s ideas saying, “T]his real-world event allows us to exercise our capabilities and gives some confidence our impact prediction models are adequate to respond to the potential impact of a larger object.”
The Planetary Defense team are given the task of tracking and warning about asteroids which can be a threat to planet Earth. NASA says that the asteroids are as small remnants of collisions in the solar system’s history. They are made up of rock-forming minerals like olivine and pyroxene, however, they can also be composed of iron and nickel.