I always see videos of people randomly filming and a rock breaches the Earths atmosphere. I presume if there was a large one we would see it a lot earlier. Is there a size specifically that astronomers look for and anything smaller than that they ignore?
In: Planetary Science
As in, identify an asteroid in space and predict its impact with Earth?
Most of It’s not about how big it is as much as having enough observations of it to calculate its future orbit, before losing track of it. Though it is true that larger objects are generally easier to see.
The vast majority of meteors are very very small. Fewer than 0.1% of the objects we can see as meteors would be big enough to track in solar orbit.
It doesn’t take a particularly large object to cause damage, something ~18m across for example caused some property damage and injuries, but no deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor
We have found some earth-crossing asteroids smaller than that, but by no means have we found all the ones larger than that.
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