A small asteroid careened toward Earth before burning up Tuesday night above northern Siberia in Russia, creating a blazing fireball in the sky witnessed across the region.
The space rock, which was less than 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) wide, had "been spotted on a collision course" with Earth, the European Space Agency said earlier Tuesday. Though the space agency issued an alert at 4:27 a.m. ET, it also said that the impact would be "harmless."
Instead, residents in the Russian republic of Yakutia witnessed a "nice fireball in the sky over northern Siberia" at 5:15 p.m. CET (11:15 a.m. ET,) the space agency said on social media site X.
Detected strikes are known as "imminent impactors" when they are discovered hours before entering the Earth's atmosphere.
NASA called the event a "harmless fireball" and said the University of Arizona's Bok telescope was among the first to spot its approach. The Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona was also credited with identifying the fast-moving asteroid ahead of its arrival.
Video posted to social media on Tuesday shows the bright fireball, temporarily dubbed C0WEPC5, zipping through the sky before breaking up and dissipating. No damage or injuries were reported from the asteroid.
"Thanks to observations from astronomers around the world, our alert system was able to predict this impact to within +/- 10 seconds," the ESA said.
Asteroid: Small 'imminent impactor' asteroid targeting Earth expected to produce 'nice fireball'
Another asteroid, known as 2020 XR, was due to fly by Earth Wednesday, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Estimated to be about the size of a football stadium, the 1,200-foot asteroid is significantly larger than the space rock that broke up over Russia. But fortunately, it's rendezvous Earth with was projected to be at a safe 1.37 million miles away, according to NASA.
Still, the distance is close enough to qualify the asteroid as a "potentially hazardous" space object.
The JPL lab, which the California Institute of Technology manages on behalf of NASA, tracks any asteroids or comets with orbits that will bring them within 4.6 million miles of Earth, or 19.5 times the distance to the moon. Its Asteroid Watch dashboard displays the date of the next five closest approaches, as well as each object's approximate diameter and its distance from Earth.
Any object larger than about 150 meters (about 492 feet) that can approach the Earth to within this distance becomes potentially hazardous, according to the lab.
Most asteroids orbit within the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But some follow paths that circulate into the inner solar system, including so-called near-Earth asteroids, according to NASA.
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Within the last few years, NASA and other space agencies have taken steps to protect humanity from threats posed by asteroids and other inbound space rocks, such as comets.
In September 2022, NASA demonstrated that it was possible to nudge an incoming asteroid out of harm's way by slamming a spacecraft into it as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Launched in November 2021, DART traveled for more than 10 months before crashing into Dimorphos, which posed no threat to Earth.
And to gauge whether authorities are prepared to defend Earth from space objects, NASA has hosted a series of exercises, the fifth and most recent of which occurred in April, with findings announced in June. It was the first such exercise to include about 100 international government representatives who gathered to work through a hypothetical scenario about an inbound asteroid.
The exercise was organized by the U.S. space agency's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which was established in 2016 to catalog near-Earth objects that could crash into the planet.
NASA is also working on an asteroid-hunting telescope known as the NEO Surveyor to find near-Earth objects capable of causing significant damage. Set to launch no earlier than June 2028, the telescope is designed to discover 90% of asteroids and comets that are 460 feet in size or larger and come within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit.
Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected]