In Canada, the All-Sky camera network recorded the fall of a meteorite

The space drama unfolded over southern Ontario on the night of Friday, November 18. Shortly before midnight Eastern time, the Catalina Sky Survey spacecraft detected a small object heading towards Earth.

This small asteroid, designated as 2022 WJ1, was monitored by observatories around the world for the next three hours before it collided with Earth near southern Ontario on November 19.

2022 WJ1 was spotted by Western's All-Sky camera network. The meteoroid entered the Earth's atmosphere south of Woodstock and moved eastward in the form of a bright fireball until it met its end north of the city of Vineland.

Analysis of the video data suggests that fragments of the meteorite probably reached earth near the southern shore of Lake Ontario.

"This fireball is especially important because the parent meteoroid was observed in a telescope before it hit the atmosphere. This provides a rare opportunity to link telescopic data about an asteroid with its behavior during atmospheric decay to get an idea of its internal structure," said Peter Brown, scientific director of the department of planetary small bodies at Western.

This is the first predicted collision that occurred over a densely populated area and within the reach of special devices. Despite the cloud cover, 6 All-Sky cameras and the Western orbital radar tracked 2022 WJ1, providing a record of the decay of this small asteroid in the atmosphere.

The last piece of this cosmic puzzle is the search for meteorites, and researchers are asking for help from the public.

"We know from the camera footage and the weather radar that tracked the falling fragments of the fireball that the meteorites almost certainly fell to earth near or to the east of Grimsby. What we need now to complete this story is to find some of these rocks and find out what material asteroid 2022 WJ1 was made of," Brown said. "It's very similar to a space mission to return a sample, but in this case the sample fell on us."