Astronomers spot small space rock just hours before it drops meteorites over Canada - Space.com

The space rock was only the sixth ever spotted just before falling to Earth.

A small space rock was detected just a few hours before hitting Earth's atmosphere and landing in Canada's Lake Ontario on Saturday (Nov. 19). .

Subsequent observations by other astronomers confirmed that the rock, coming from the direction of the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, was on a collision course with Earth. ?

According to the European Space Agency (ESA), this was only the sixth case of an asteroid being found just before impact.

In March, a Hungarian astronomer detected a somewhat bigger space rock only two hours before it burned up above the northern Atlantic Ocean. .

Related: Asteroid apocalypse: How big must a space rock be to end human civilization.

Space agency officials wrote that most of the fragments probably fell into Lake Ontario, with some small pieces possibly landing near the towns of Grimsby and McNab.

The international astronomy community is mapping the asteroid population near Earth with the aim to track all potentially dangerous asteroids.

In September this year, NASA's DART probe smashed into a small asteroid moonlet Dimorphos with the goal of changing its orbit around a parent asteroid Didymos.

She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master's in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor's in Journalism and Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Prague's Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency