It did seem strange that just when we are waiting for a 45 metre celestial cannonball to skim the Earths atmosphere, a much smaller one took everyone by surprise and sneaked in there to grab all the headlines.
Due to everyone and his dog owning a phone with a camera, the falling ball of rock was caught on film by countless Russian video camera owners as it impressively exploded in the sky.
The obvious question was to ask was this in anyway connected to the arrival of the asteroid later and the European Space agency poured water on that particular camp fire immediately by saying there was no link but others, such as the Australian Astronomical Observatory, thought it could possibly be a bit of asteroid debris preceding the much bigger object.
As it was only a few hours between the explosion and the arrival of the Asteroid, that was not enough time for a doomsday Conspiracy theory to circulate which would lead to the streets full of people giving away their possessions, telling their managers exactly what they thought of them and blocking up the church
confessional boxes.
One good thing to come out of it was an explanation of what an asteroid is (small rock orbiting a star), a meteoroid (small pieces of space debris in space), a meteor (a meteoroid that has entered the earth’s atmosphere) and a meteorite (space debris that strikes the surface of the earth) if only because the
presenters were getting angry tweets by pedantic amateur astrologers when they kept interchanging between referring to it as all four things in the coverage.
So the two events were probably not related and we were not all doomed and the asteroid harmlessly brushed past by us although the glaziers in one small Russian town are all now driving Ferrari's and their wives wearing mink coats.
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