PLANETARY EXPLORATION NEWSLETTER
Volume 2, Number 49 (October 6, 2008)

PEN Website: http://planetarynews.org
Editor: Mark V. Sykes 
Co-Editors: Nic Richmond, Matt Balme
Email: pen_editor at psi.edu

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SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: BOLIDE IMPACT PREDICTED TONIGHT!

[Editor Note: Condensed from NEO News 10/6/08, David Morrison]

A very small asteroid (or rock) has been discovered that is on course 
for an impact tonight in Sudan. This information is from various 
reports to posted to MPML (the Minor Planet Mailing List at 
groups.yahoo.com/group/mpml/). The impactor is only about 2 m across 
and will break up in the atmosphere, with no risk to those on the 
ground. (If something this size hit in the daytime, it would probably 
not be noticed, but at night it should put on quite show).

Alan Harris writes that this object, with the survey-assigned 
designation 8TA9D69, was discovered by the University of Arizona 
Mt. Lemmon survey and will almost certainly, tonight, become the first 
impacting bolide discovered before entry into the Earth's atmosphere. 
Steve Chesley (JPL) reports that atmospheric entry will occur on 
2008 Oct 07 0246 UTC over northern Sudan.

The effect of this atmospheric impact will be the release, in either 
a single shot or maybe a sequence of explosions, of about 1 kiloton of 
energy. This means that the damage on the ground is expected to be 
zero. The location of these explosions is not easy to predict due to 
the atmospheric braking effects.


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