Car-sized asteroid just made closest-to-Earth flyby on record – and NASA didn’t see it coming

A car-sized asteroid has just made the closest known approach to Earth without colliding with the planet. And researchers didn’t even know it until hours after his death.

Asteroid 2020 HQ, formerly known as ZTFoDxQ, hovered over Earth at 12:08 a.m. EDT on Sunday, approaching 1,830 miles away. It marks the flyby of the closest asteroid on record in which the object actually survived, according to NASA.

For comparison, the International Space Station is 404 km away.

“Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) pass near Earth all the time, but 2020 HQ has passed closer to Earth than any other known NEA with no real impact,” a NASA spokesperson told Tuesday. CBS News.

2020 QG was first observed at the Palomar Observatory six hours after its passage over the southern Indian Ocean.

“It’s quite an accomplishment to find these tiny asteroids close together in the first place, because they go by so fast,” said Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the south of the country. California. “There is usually only a short window of a few days before or after a close approach when this small asteroid is close enough to Earth to be bright enough but not so close that it is moving too quickly across the sky to be detected by a telescope. “

The asteroid was traveling at 27,600 miles per hour, or nearly 8 miles per second, which NASA said was a little slower than average. On average, an asteroid of its size only passes it a few times a year.

Measuring only 10 to 20 feet in diameter, the asteroid was not large enough to pose a serious threat. If he had been on a collision course, it probably would have ended up like a fireball – an extremely bright meteor – as it crashed into Earth’s atmosphere.

The asteroid “approached the Earth from the direction of the Sun and was not discovered until after its passage and could be observed in the night sky by ground observatories,” confirmed NASA. “By some estimates there are hundreds of millions of small asteroids the size of 2020 HQ, but they are extremely difficult to find until they are very close to Earth.”

NASA closely follows near-Earth objects, but only knows a fraction of them due to such observation limitations.

NASA scientists are developing a telescope that could detect asteroids coming from the sun’s direction, eliminating the current blind spot from their observations. The near-Earth object monitoring mission could be launched as early as 2025.

NASA also plans to launch the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in July 2021. DART will crash on purpose into a harmless asteroid moon in the fall of 2022 in an attempt to change its motion, during the first planetary defense test.