In a first, asteroid's journey from source to Earth mapped

Astronomers have recreated the 22m-year-long journey of an asteroid that blasted over Botswana, showering meteorites in the Kalahari desert.

This is the first time scientists have reconstructed such a path of an asteroid to its source.

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The asteroid started its journey from Vesta, one of the biggest bodies in the asteroid belt that circles the sun between Jupiter and Mars.

It reached the Earth's atmosphere with a speed of 37,000 mph in June 2018 and broke apart over the central Kalahari game reserve, creating a very bright fireball.

Nasa scientists had tracked the object from as far out as the moon through telescopes in Arizona and Hawaii.

After it landed on Earth, the researchers asked astronomers in Australia to check images from the SkyMapper telescope situated in New South Wales.

The telescope is used to study black holes and in this case, it had recorded the six-tonne asteroid's flight path, The Guardian reported.

"We wouldn't have noticed it had it not been for the tip-off by the American discoverers, and it hits close to home," Christian Wolf, an astronomer at Australian National University said.

"Granted, it's the Kalahari and I have never been there, but when your day job involves orienteering along a chain of black holes with an average step size of 1bn light years between the waypoints, the Kalahari feels awfully close to your keyboard."

The images of the asteroid, named 2018LA, captured from three telescopes installed far away from the Earth's surface allowed the researchers to reconstruct its trajectory and find out its origin.

The search led to Vesta, a 300-mile-wide asteroid that is sometimes visible without a telescope.