NASA has reported spotting the first asteroid of 2014 on the first day of the year and it entered the Earth's atmosphere, but did not make it to the ground.

In the early hours of New Year's Day, the tiny asteroid, named "2014 AA," entered the Earth's atmosphere. In several models and predictions, the most likely impact location for the asteroid was West Africa. Other models suggested Central America or East Africa.

Bill Gray, of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., and Steve Chesley, of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., provided the only available projection models. In all three possible scenarios, the scientists said 2014 AA would hit the Earth's atmosphere.

However, the space rock was believed to be between 7 and 10 feet in length, similar to asteroid 2008 TC3, which was also discovered just before impacting Earth's atmosphere. Like 2008 TC3, 2014 AA is believed to have broken apart shortly after hitting the Earth's atmosphere and would have done so somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean.

So far, NASA's Near-Earth Object Program has picked up scattered and weak signals from infrasound stations that may be of the asteroid. Peter Brown, of the University of Western Ontario, told Sky and Telescope he calculated the precise location of where the asteroid impacted Earth's atmosphere was above a spot 1,900 miles of the coast of Caracas, Venezuela.

"The energy is very hard to estimate with much accuracy - the signals are all weak and buried in noise," Brown told Sky and Telescope. "Had this occurred in

the middle of the day I doubt we would see any signals at all."

The asteroid also seemed to be too small for anyone to see. NASA released an animated GIF showing 2014 AA, but William Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office in Huntsville, Ala., said he did not find any evidence of a sky sighting.

"I'm not aware of any visual sightings," he said. "Looks like it was too far away from human eyes."