Ein Asteroid Impaktor… und Meteoriten?

Recently-discovered asteroid 2024 BX1 is… no more, it’s now meteorites (somewhere). Discovered just last week by Krisztián Sárneczky, of Hungary’s Konkoly Observatory, the object entered over eastern Germany and appeared as an obvious fireball. This is Sárneczky’s third pre-impact detection; after he reported the initial coordinates, the (multiple) orbit determination computers eventually solved for an Earth close approach of zero distance- that is, impact. Fortunately, it was clear that, based on brightness (or lack thereof), 2024 BX1 was tiny; depending on albedo (reflectivity), it could (have) be(en) 0.7-1.6 meters in diameter.

Meteorites (around Nennhausen) may be possible, based on the strength of the object. ~1m is a bit small to leave surviving, macroscopic clasts; weaker meteorite classes would burn and disperse. There’s a chance stronger clans and groups would break but reach the ground, though. It also appears (based on orbit determination) that the BX1 trajectory was a bit mild. The snow in Germany right now makes meteorite-hunting a bit easier, we’ll see.

Should this fall lead to recoveries, we may have an Almahata Sitta situation. We see asteroids, plenty of them; we see (and hold) meteorites. However, matching the two is an open problem in this field. We can make broad-brush statements with confidence: dark (carbonaceous) asteroids are very likely the source of dark (carbonaceous) meteorites. Drilling down much further starts to get more and more speculative. It takes hard data to break ambiguities and close off leads that go nowhere. Hard… like a surviving meteorite!

Also note that we are not panicking, and never did. I must emphasize: at no point did any real authority or professional ever put out any sort of scare post. We are quite capable of determining that a dim (thus, tiny) object is beneficial for geochemistry/cosmochemistry studies, not any sort of threat or danger. The community passed around the info it typically passes around on new discoveries, and the process unfolded as the process typically unfolds- without panic.