Asteroid Collision Caught By Hubble Space Telescope

The amazing and now-venerable Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of an event that, while an extremely common occurrence in our Solar System, has never been caught on camera before by any of our instruments.
Our Solar System has a band of rocks and debris termed the Asteroid Belt, which is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In this belt there exist countless millions of rocks and aggregate boulders, each spinning around our Sun in their own orbit. Oftentimes, these asteroids glance off of one another, disrupting their orbits. Recently there has been much talk about near-Earth asteroids tracked by NASA and other space agencies. These asteroids all come from the asteroid belt, and are knocked off their orbits and toward our planet's orbit, by collisions such as the one captured by the Hubble.
On January 25th and then again on the 29th, the Hubble Space Telescope captured this striking image. (click image to enlarge)

Below is the close-up of the image. (click image to enlarge)

What appears to be a drooping "X" shape on the left of the image is the end result of the collission.

Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down because of collisions, but such a head-on crash had never been seen before.
"If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight," said principal investigator David Jewitt, from the University of California at Los Angeles.
At first, astronomers thought what they saw might be a main belt comet, a rare case of a comet orbiting while in the asteroid belt.
But the images taken by Hubble revealed the complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the object's nucleus.
Jewitt said the filaments are made of dust and gravel. Some of them are being swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight, creating the long, straight dust streaks, he said.
The nucleus of the presumed boom is 460 feet in diameter, NASA said. ( CNN )

Even with the relatively crowded asteroid belt's many inhabitants, capturing an image of a collision is an amazing feat. -FUPPETS- continues to be astounded by the magnificence of the human scientific endeavor.
Can you imagine being asked to point out something just 460 feet in diameter from about 2.7 AU away?

Old Telescope + New Technology = Asteroid Hunting Supreme!

In the near past, it was pure science fiction conjecture to claim that asteroids or other solar system debris would strike the Earth. It was even more ridiculous to suggest that this was an event that happened several times throughout our planet's history. Even plainly visible impact craters, such as the Barringer Crater (or "Meteor Crater" as it is commonly known), were thought to come from volcanic activity.
Here is a view of the Barringer Crater from space. The Crater was originally called Diablo Canyon Crater, then re-named the Barringer Crater after the man who first proposed that this was an impact crater, not a volcanic one.

It was not until Eugene Merle Shoemaker and his research came along in 1963 that it was conclusively shown to be an asteroid impact crater.
Scientists at the University of Arizona's Spacewatch Project are using the telescope at Kitt Peak, outfitted with modern anti-blur video sensors, to scan the skies and track as many asteroids as possible. Here is a video describing their efforts, from Space.com . There are many other such impact craters on the Earth, and it is very likely that there are many asteroids out in our Solar System that could easily strike the Earth. After all, our planet is upwards of 5 Billion years old. Our Sun has at least 10 Billion more years of nuclear fuel left. We humans could be very lucky to have evolved into our modern civilization in the relatively short time span between asteroid impacts. There are many catastrophes that we can do nearly nothing about. Earthquakes are unpredictable and uncontrollable. The same goes for massive volcanic eruptions. Asteroid impact, no matter how far-fetched it may sound, is not just possible, it is probable, and it is the one thing that we can have advance warning of in time to actually do something about it. These things are HAULING MAJOR ASS through the Solar System, and an impact would wipe out almost all life as we know it.

Based on crater formation rates determined from the Earth's closest celestial partner, the Moon, astrogeologists have determined that during the last 600 million years, the Earth has been struck by 60 objects of a diameter of five kilometers or more. The smallest of these impactors would release the equivalent of ten million megatons of TNT and leave a crater 95 kilometers across. For comparison, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield of 50 megatons.

ASTEROID Explodes Over Africa

There are nearly an infinite number of objects in our Solar System that could potentially strike the Earth. The main barrier to an actual impact is our dense atmosphere. Most anything that comes into our gravity well will be burned up as it enters the atmosphere, creating anything from shooting stars to large fireballs in the sky, depending upon the size of the object. Giant objects, the size of a house or bigger, can have enough mass to not burn up fully, striking the Earth as Meteorites.
-FUPPETS- has experienced a fireball in the sky twice, both in broad daylight over Houston, Texas. It is quite a fantastic sight. One exploded after about a minute of crossing the atmosphere, while another seemed to "bounce off" the atmosphere after blazing for less than a minute. The image below is a relatively close-up view of a fireball meteor. Click the image to enlarge.

-FUPPETS- brings this up because of this article.
Earlier this week a table-sized Asteroid exploded over a remote area of Africa, exploding with the force of over 1 kiloton of TNT.