Asteroid filmed crashing into farm in South Africa

A still from the video. Photo credit: YouTube / Barend Swanepoel

An asteroid has been caught on camera smashing into an area in South Africa near Botswana.  

The footagewas captured by farmer Barend Swanepoel, who spotted the fireball coming down in the evening near his father's farm in Ottosdal, a small town in the north of South Africa, close to the border with Botswana. 

 

Mr Swanepoel filmed the asteroid while on his way home from a friend's farm, East Coast Radio reported. The video was uploaded to YouTube on Saturday and has since racked up over one million views. 

The space rock had been monitored hours by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona before it hurtled through the atmosphere, travelling at 17 kilometres per second. 

It's the third event of its kind, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory researchers said, following another asteroid landing on October 7, 2008, in northern Sudan. 

Another descended into the Atlantic Ocean, northeast of Brazil on January 1, 2014. 

Newshub. 

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