The majority of asteroids are found by NASA-funded telescopes. Hungary is a tiny Eastern European country with less than 10 million inhabitants.
The astronomer who discovered the small space rock that was about to hit Earth made headlines last month. The success of Sárneczky has been achieved against many odds. According to the Weather Atlas, the sky over Hungary can be overcast for up to 190 days a year. Only half a year is left for observations.
Sárneczky has been a professional asteroid hunter since 2010 and makes the most of it. His life has been dictated by the weather since August 2020, when his asteroid searching project got full-time control of a 1960s 60- cm telescope.
He told Space.com that he has been searching for near-Earth asteroids every clear night since August 2020 except for four to five nights around the full moon and a few short summer nights when he was on vacation. I take pictures when the weather is good. I wait to see if the weather gets better if it is cloudy.
There are asteroids in deep space.
Night after night, from dusk to dawn, Sárneczky sits at his telescope, 60 miles away from the capital of Hungary, and scans the sky for fast- moving objects. The Minor Planet Center is the NASA-funded hub responsible for keeping track of asteroids and comets.
If that happens, I have to stop the regular search program and start observing the new object.
The diligence is paying off. He discovered the asteroid that exploded above the Northern Atlantic two hours after he found it. He discovered the other one a few days later. The asteroid was about 10 feet wide and appeared to be on a collision course with Earth, but missed the planet by a few thousand miles. Since then, he has seen other space rocks.
He said that he has 70 designated near-Earth asteroids, 661 numbered and around one thousand designated, but unnumbered main-belt and Jupiter Trojan asteroids.
NASA has stepped up investment into asteroid monitoring, funding new dedicated telescopes in the world's best locations and expanding existing ones since the 2000s. The largest camera in the world, the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii, is one of the powerful observatories. The goal of these telescopes is to find 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 140 m.
Even though the power of these facilities is there, smaller observatories, such as the one in Sreczky, or even amateur skywatchers with telescopes in their backyards, often play.
The discovery telescopes only report the first position of an unknown object and often don't have a follow-up telescope to confirm it. The confirmation observations from telescopes around the world can take days.
An amateur observer in neighboring Slovakia confirmed the validity of Sárneczky's 2022 EB5 in a matter of seconds. If that amateur had not been looking at the Near-Earth Object Confirmation Page (NEOCP), they would not have reported the discoveries. The space rock would have hit the atmosphere above the empty ocean in just two hours, leaving a mystery. The five asteroids discovered before they hit the planet are the result of the factor of chance.
In the case of the small Earth impactor, the follow-up observations were done quickly. The discoverer continued to submit the positions even after he had tracked the object with his telescope. The object was interesting and other people saw it.
The Minor Planet Center continuously strives to make it easier for the small professional teams and amateurs all over the world to quickly see observations of others, but also to enter their own data.
The opportunity to appear in the center's bulletin is what motivates amateur observers and professionals at small regional observatories.
Not all Earth-bound rocks are discovered, and even larger rocks can be undetected. The asteroid exploded near the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia. The United States dropped an atomic bomb on Japan during World War II, but the blast was 30 to 40 times stronger than that.
Despite new investments, a rock like this, or perhaps one even bigger, could still strike out of the blue.
The Chelyabinsk meteorite arrived from the daytime side, so ground-based observatories couldn't observe it.
The mission would be delayed two years by the priorities outlined in the budget presented by President Joe Biden last month.
The risk of undetected asteroid strikes like the one that hit Chelyabinsk will decrease with the help of large-scale NASA-funded asteroid-hunting projects. The catalog of rocks spotted just before they arrive is likely to grow.
It doesn't make a difference for me. He would be content to make Hungary the second best country because there was no chance of beating NASA in asteroid discoveries.
The astronomer said that he would be happy if Hungary was the second most successful country in discovering asteroids.
Only two non-NASA funded observatories are currently in the top ten of the world's most prolific asteroid spotters.
The Chilean team was in tenth place last year. Hungary is number seven, behind only NASA-funded telescopes, thanks to the lucky streak of Sárneczky.
In March, the weather was better so I was able to observe the sky more. I was lucky that my telescope turned in the right direction.
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