last week a small asteroid made a meter long was about uh was spotted heading towards urest before it entered the atmosphere over the southwestern Pacific near the Philippines it didn't cause any damage on the ground but it does beg the question of how often this phenomenon occurs to speak more about this we can bring in France 24's Julia Seager Julia great to see you so talk us to what exactly happened so last Wednesday indeed the European Space Agency just casually tweeted that they had spotted this one meter long asteroid and that it was set to enter the earth atmosphere about 5:08 p.m. local time over the Philippines and they went on to say that it was there was nothing to fear because this asteroid was harmless and indeed throughout the day Isa was able to predict more and more precisely the path of impact um and the predictions actually proved to be correct and the asteroid was renamed 2024 rw1 and it did enter the atmosphere at a speed of 72,000 km hour so of course what people saw and many onlookers were able to capture this moment uh is a huge ball of fire this is actually what happens when an object from space enters the atmosphere it's called atmospheric uh disintegration now of course a lot of Internet users also wondered whether they should be worried about the fact that this asteroid was detected so late meaning just hours before impact and Isa actually uh answered to that and said actually it's great news it's only the ninth time in history that we were able to accurately predict an asteroid's trajectory and this is just a sign of how much surveillance technology for what we call Planetary protection planetary defense is uh is increasing now I'm saying planetary defense of course it sounds like Men In Black right but it's actually a thing planetary defense has everything having to do with protecting the Earth from outer space threats and what is the probability of an asteroid actually hitting Earth well first of all an asteroid is a remnant of uh a remnant of the formation of the solar system there are about a million of them and even more but the good news is that they tend to orbit on what we call an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter as you can see here and they tend to uh stay on that course because of the gravitational forces of the planets but sometimes of course they can Veer off course and that includes going towards Earth now there you know they range in size but larger asteroids those who interest us and could actually impact Earth and create a lot of chaos well they tend to strike only once uh every Century whereas smaller asteroids tend to enter the atmosphere two to three times a year now of course the question is why is it that bigger asteroids tend to not hit the earth as often well it's a statistical reason because there are less of them uh and the second reason is because big asteroids have a bigger Mass so they tend to be more influenced by the gravitational force and hence stay on that track now it's important to say to our viewers so that uh they you know so that we can reassure them we tend to detect much more larger asteroids because they're bigger but also because they're much brighter and why is it so difficult to predict the trajectory of such asteroids well it is indeed very hard to predict and the reason why there are many reasons but one of them is the fact that we have a lot of blind spots first of all there's what we call the solar glare so if the object is coming towards us as in the path of the sun we can't see it because of the glare and our telescopes are also limited uh because of the rotation of the earth in the night day cycle but that said early warning systems are improving we have what we call detection uh deflection systems and I don't know if you remember this but we actually spoke about it here on France 2 in 2022 uh there was the dart mission where they were able to successfully redirect um an asteroid so what they did is that they smashed a device as you can see here on an asteroid and they were able to uh deflect the trajectory but the problem is and it was really seen as a huge success this was an exercise right this was not the asteroid wasn't a threat towards Earth but the problem is just a couple of days ago they uh published this report saying that all of the debris that was caused by the impact may be coming back towards Earth so this does beg the question of whether or not we know what we're doing with this deflection technology and uh you know we have to be careful to not worsen the situation we may have created in this case the first man-made meteor shower so if we go through experience a sort of Armageddon situation we're to blame uh Julia thank you very much a lot of a lot of information there Julia Seer there