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Small asteroid becomes closest ever seen passing Earth: NASA
WASHINGTON, Aug 19, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – An asteroid the size of an SUV passed
1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above Earth, the closest asteroid ever
observed passing by our planet, NASA said Tuesday.
If it had been on a collision course with Earth, the asteroid — named
2020 QG — would likely not have caused any damage, instead disintegrating in
the atmosphere, creating a fireball in the sky, or a meteor, NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said in a statement.
The asteroid, which was about 10 to 20 feet (three to six meters) long,
passed above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday at 0408 GMT.
It was moving at nearly eight miles per second (12.3 kilometers per
second), well below the geostationary orbit of about 22,000 miles at which
most telecommunication satellites fly.
The asteroid was first recorded six hours after its approach by the Zwicky
Transient Facility, a telescope at the Palomar Observatory at the California
Institute of Technology, as a long trail of light in the sky.
The US space agency said that similarly sized asteroids pass by Earth at a
similar distance a few times per year.
But they’re difficult to record, unless they’re heading directly towards
the planet, in which case the explosion in the atmosphere is usually noticed
— as in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, when the explosion of an object about
66 feet long shattered windows for miles, injuring a thousand people.
One of NASA’s missions is to monitor larger asteroids (460 feet) that
could actually pose a threat to Earth, but their equipment also tracks
smaller ones.
“It’s really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close, because we
can see the Earth’s gravity dramatically bends its trajectory,” said Paul
Chodas, the director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA.
According to the JPL’s calculations, the asteroid turned by about 45
degrees due to Earth’s gravitational pull.
BSS/AFP/MSY/0811 hrs