On October 8, 2009 about 03:00 Greenwich time, an atmospheric fireball blast was observed and recorded over an island region of Indonesia. I missed this one! But apparently so did every telescope in the world.   There is a NASA program in place for tracking all the big asteroids which might hit earth, those that  cross our orbit at some point. Usually it is the big ones that we watch, with more funding and equipment required to identify and then track each object.

Here is an quote from the JPL Nasa site.

“Right now we know of 322 large, near-Earth asteroids,” Pravdo said. “That was a fairly small fraction of the 2,000 asteroids in our previous estimate. With our new calculations of between 500 and 1,000 such objects, this 322 figure represents a large chunk.” While stressing that we must learn more about potential hazards from asteroids, Rabinowitz said, “None of the asteroids we’ve observed will hit Earth anytime in the near future.”

Regarding the asteroid in Indonisia Nasa  said:

“Assuming an estimated size of about 5-10 meters in diameter, we would expect a fireball event of this magnitude about once every 2 to 12 years on average. As a rule, the most common types of stony asteroids would not be expected to cause ground damage unless their diameters were about 25 meters in diameter or larger.”

Small as it was, this asteroid detonated with the energy of 3 Hiroshima bombs.Witnesses in Indonesia heard the explosion and spotted a huge fireball in the sky. The blast was also heard by monitoring stations 10,000 miles away.  It was also caught on by local media. Remember this was a small one!