Aldemotte said: Was this meteor ever monitored? I am surprised no one at NASA or anywhere else would give some kind of warning ahead of time.
Estimations put it at around the size of a sports utility vehicle, far smaller than our current instrumentation has any hope of reliably detecting. Generally, if it isn't 1km across at least, we probably don't know about it. The European Space Agency is downplaying suggestions that it was a fragment of the larger asteroid scientists are tracking - 2012 DA14 - but that remains a possibility.
Aldemotte said: Was this meteor ever monitored? I am surprised no one at NASA or anywhere else would give some kind of warning ahead of time.
Actually, only a tiny fraction of the sky can even be monitored, since there are only so many telescopes to look with. (You're looking out millions of miles for something that's relatively microscopic.)
What's more, with standard light telescopes, you can't even see the asteroid unless it's on the other side of the Earth from the sun, and it's reflecting light - anything from the half of the solar system facing sunward we are essentially blinded to.
As many doomsday scenario writers would attest to, we may not even see a mass-extinction impact asteroid until it's basically already in our atmosphere.
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