First 2014 Asteroid Hits Over Atlantic Ocean

Discovered by a sky watcher in Arizona early New Year's Day, the first asteroid sighted in 2014 plunged to Earth somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean about 25 hours later.

Richard Kowalski spent New Year's Eve scanning for near-Earth objects with a 60-inch telescope on Arizona's Mount Lemmon. He noticed a 19th-magnitude blip streaming through northern section the Orion constellation in a seven-image series that started at 5:16 p.m. (1:16 a.m. Jan. 1 per Universal Time.) After determining it was a new discovery, Kowalski submitted positions and times to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.

But neither Kowalski nor apparently anyone else realized the little shooting star was on a collision course with the planet.

On its Website, the MPC has posted it's "virtually certain" 2014 AA, the asteroid's official designation, hit Earth. Calculations by researcher Stephen Chesley of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., suggest the impact occurred over the Atlantic Ocean, between Central America to East Africa.

Chesley said it's likely the collision happened just off the West African coast at around 2:30 a.m. UT.

The asteroid strike, about 22 hours after the initial report to the MPC, comes five years after another small asteroid, 2008 TC3, struck the earth over Sudan about 19 hours after its discovery by the same telescope.

For the 2008 event, astronomers had nearly a day of advance warning before the impact. Telescopes worldwide logged hundreds of observations before the object slammed into the atmosphere and a multitude of fragments were eventually recovered.

Asteroid 2014 AA averaged 110-million miles from the sun in a low-inclination orbit that crossed paths with Mars as well as Earth, per images taken in the hours before its impact.

"I'm kicking myself for not having spotted this," admitted amateur near-Earth-object sleuth Bill Gray, from Project Pluto, told Sky & Telescope.

Most mornings, he said, he downloads the events that have led up to recent discoveries and computes the probability of potential for potential impacts and near-misses.

"However, on New Year's Day, I'd made arrangements to go with my family to visit my sister, go for a walk, stop off for a doughnut, shovel snow, etc., etc.," Gray said. He took the holiday off from his daily routine and didn't even know an impact was imminent until a couple of hours before the strike.

The Mount Lemmon Survey is part of the Catalina Sky Survey, a coordinated effort between three individual survey projects that began in 1998. The Mount Lemmon Survey telescope is a Cassegrain reflector built in the 1960s.