AT the incredible moment a high-speed asteroid the size of a car exploded over the South African wilderness just seconds before impact, the spinning space rock was captured by two farmers on CCTV as it hurtled down from the heavens leaving a blazing white heat trail in its impressive wake.

It blew up in a huge fireball 48 kilometers before impact — but was just two seconds away from slamming into the savannah.

Asteroid trackers at NASA quickly determined the rock — which was about 1.82 meters across — was too small to pose any danger. It burned up in the Saturday evening sky over Botswana, eight hours after first being noticed.

Farmer Barend Swanepoel posted this incredible footage of the cosmic boulder heading toward his farm at Ottosdal near the border with Botswana at 6:40 p.m.

NASA officials said the scramble among scientists and asteroid observers was a good training exercise. Their ability to zoom in on likely impact areas bodes well for the future, if and when a bigger object heads our way.

“This was a much smaller object than we are tasked to detect and warn about,” NASA’s planetary defense officer, Lindley Johnson, said in a statement.

“However, this real-world event allows us to exercise our capabilities and gives some confidence our impact prediction models are adequate to respond to the potential impact of a larger object.”

Swanepoel had been having coffee on his neighbor’s farm “between Ottosdal and Hartbeesfontein” and was driving home when he saw the “huge fireball” in the sky.

He said, “The advantage I had was I saw it in color and it was not like on the cameras. It was a fireball falling with this red tail behind and I thought that the grassland is going to burn.”

Unfortunately, the trees next to the gravel road concealed Swanepoel’s view of the final plunge.

He later checked his CCTV and said, “One of the small cameras monitoring the barn with feed for his animals caught the footage that you saw on social media. It was incredible to see.”

(SD-Agencies)