Earlier this month, a meteor exploded (I guess, literally) above the Russian town of Chelyabinsk causing plenty of injuries and damage. Thanks to car cams installed in (many) Russian cars, amazing footage was captured of the meteor’s entrance and explosion in the upper-regions of our atmosphere (video).
Coincidentally, around the same day, an asteroid was supposed to ‘near-miss’ our planet and various space agencies were quick to report that this meteor had nothing to do with that asteroid. However, initial calculations put the size of the meteor in the 17 meter range with an approximate weight of 10K metric tonnes. Just a couple of days ago, astronomers in Columbia traced the meteor to the Apollo asteroids (full Wikipedia analysis).
Obviously, this event has been compared with the Tungunska explosion (wikipedia again) and it has raised awareness of the dangers of extra-orbital objects and apparently, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (link) has suggested the possibly set up an “action team for near-Earth objects”. Tracking these objects is extremely hard tho: detecting a 17 meter object in space hurling at us with a speed of 18 km/s is nearly impossible.