Dixon High School graduate on national stage for discovering asteroid before it impacts Earth

DIXON – As a member of the Catalina Sky Survey, Jacqueline Fazekas accomplished something Wednesday morning that has been done only eight times before. The 2016 Dixon High School graduate, now an astronomer, discovered an asteroid before it had broken through the Earth’s atmosphere.

And if that isn’t rare enough, all indications point to her being the first woman to do so.

Fazekas discovered the object, named CAQTDL2, about 3 a.m. Wednesday. The asteroid – about 3 feet in diameter – harmlessly entered Earth’s atmosphere about 11:40 a.m. CST, above the Philippines, according to the CSS.

The CSS is a project funded through NASA’s Near Earth Object Observation Program based at the University of Arizona. The program operates telescopes on Mount Lemmon and Mount Bigelow in Arizona. After images of the same spots in the sky are created, the images are compared to look for objects that are moving.

Whenever it detects something that is possibly moving, the computer will alert the observers who are running the telescope. Then it’s their job to decide whether or not the computer detected a moving object, Fazekas said in a telephone interview with Shaw Local News Network on Wednesday.

“I was working last night and finding some objects, and one of the objects that I saw was a faint detection, but it looked real. I submitted it as a potential new object,” she said.

Using a program called Scout, which was developed by NASA to calculate the potential risk of moving objects in space, the CSS was alerted that it had a 25% chance of impacting the Earth, Fazekas said.

At that point, several other telescopes around the world, along with the CSS, continued to watch the object. Over the next few hours, “we were able to determine that it had a 100% chance of impact, and narrowed down the location that it would impact,” she said.

About 5 p.m. local time Wednesday in the Philippines, the asteroid burned up in the atmosphere and created a fireball visible off the eastern coast of the northern Philippines, Fazekas said.

Cloud cover from Typhoon Yagi made observations somewhat difficult, she said. The storm, now equivalent to a Category 3 Atlantic hurricane, according to NOAA.gov, has been affecting the northern Philippines for the past several days.

Asteroids this small are estimated to hit Earth about every two weeks, but they are very rarely spotted before making impact with the planet, according to the European Space Agency.

“This is just the ninth asteroid that humankind has ever spotted before impact,” the ESA tweeted.

The first asteroid to be spotted before impact was discovered in 2008 by Richard Kowalski, another member of the Catalina Sky Survey. Kowalski discovered another asteroid in 2014 and a third in 2018. The fourth was discovered in 2009 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, a robotic astronomical survey and early warning system. Then, David Rankin, another member of the CSS, spotted one in 2022. Finally, Krisztián Sárneczky, a Hungarian astronomer, discovered three asteroids: one each in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

“I never thought I’d be finding an impactor, especially. I’ve worked there two and a half years. I haven’t even found a comet yet, which are usually a lot more common,” Fazekas said.

Fazekas started at the CSS in January 2022 as her first job out of college. She attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, with a dual major in astrophysics and space physics. During school, Fazekas gained experience doing observational astronomy using the telescope the university has on its campus.

“I think I’m very fortunate to have had that opportunity, getting that experience in school and then being able to get a job in my field, because I really love what I do. It’s pretty different from anything I thought I might do, it wasn’t necessarily my dream to become an astronomer,” Fazekas said.

Fazekas always has been very interested in space. “I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut,” she said.

Before graduating from Dixon High School, she planned to major in aerospace engineering with an astronautics concentration and minor in space studies. Her goal was to become a physicist in the U.S. Air Force.

“I wanted to be the first woman on Mars,” Fazekas said. “But the first woman to discover an asteroid before impact, I’ll take that, too.”