A small asteroid on a collision course with Earth today burned up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere.

The European Space Agency (ESA) says a 3-foot (1-meter) asteroid struck the atmosphere and burned up harmlessly on Wednesday (Sept. 4) around 12:46 p.m. ET (1646 GMT) above the western Pacific Ocean near Luzon Island in the Philippines. 

The asteroid, known as 2024 RW1, was discovered today by research technologist Jacqueline Fazekas with the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, a NASA-funded observatory near Tucson, Arizona dedicated to tracking and cataloging near-Earth objects. It was only the ninth asteroid that has been spotted prior to impact, ESA wrote in a post on X .