NASA captures flyby of closest asteroid on record

Over the past weekend, an SUV-sized asteroid passed Earth in the closest-to-its-type flyby on record. Traveling at around 8 miles per second and measuring around 10-20 feet, the small boulder came about 1,800 miles over the Indian Ocean before returning to deep space.

NASA scientists only detected the asteroid when it was already on an outbound path, which may sound worrying, but it’s actually a common case. Near-Earth asteroids (NEA) are notoriously difficult to catch on a telescope, and most pass safely, although much further. In the case of this NEA, named 2020 HQ, an impact would have resulted in an unusually bright meteor of which there are numerous occurrences each year.

“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 California. . As an added bonus, the object’s proximity allowed scientists to watch Earth’s gravity bend its course. “Our calculations show that this asteroid was rotated about 45 degrees when it flipped over our planet,” Chodas detailed in NASA’s announcement of the discovery.

NEA 2020 HQ was first captured six hours after its closest approach to Earth, at 12:08 a.m. EDT Sunday, by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a sky surveillance telescope based at Palomar Observatory in Caltech in the county. from San Diego. The image of the asteroid appeared as a long trail of light against an otherwise static starry sky.

While the smallest near-Earth asteroids do not pose a serious threat to the inhabitants of Earth, there is a small difference in size between these tiny space rocks and their more dangerous relatives before detection is better accomplished. Objects measuring around 460 feet and above have a slower speed of movement in the sky and therefore more easily captured by available instruments. NASA set a goal in 2005 to find 90% of the NEA in this larger range.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly expressed his concern about impact events on Earth, even citing this as a main reason humans are becoming a multiplanetary species. “The risk of asteroid impact is well understood, but not comets. This worries me, ”he recently written on Twitter. Notably, humans still lack the technology to prevent Earth-bound space rocks – frozen or not – from causing a disaster scenario. However, NASA and its international partners have put in place a few missions to address this issue.