In a story worthy of Hollywood treatment, shocked astronomers in Sudan watched as an asteroid exploded above earth into a meteor shower, and then went into the desert to retrieve the pieces, according to an AFP report. A study in the British journal Nature concluded that this is the first time ever that scientists were able to recover pieces from a specific asteroid observed in space.

"Any number of meteorites have been observed as fireballs and smoking meteor trails as they come through the atmosphere," said co-author Douglas Rumble, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution, in the article. "But to actually see this object before it gets to the Earth's atmosphere and then follow it in--that's the unique thing."

The story goes that on October 6th, an amateur stargazer in Arizona filed a report of an asteroid he detected that could eventually hit the Earth (although it would be no danger, given its size). The report said that he also alerted the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Steve Chesley, who did a rush calculation on the asteroid's orbit; the program indicated a 100 percent chance of impact. "I'd never seen that before in my life," he said.

From there, astronomers across the globe scrambled to figure out where it would hit, recorded several sightings (including one from a KLM passenger jet en route to Amsterdam), and tracked down all the pieces. I can't do it justice in a short blog post, so check out the AFP report for full details--it's really cool stuff. (Image credit: NASA/JPL artist rendering)