Tiny Asteroid makes record closest fly-by earth over Southern Indian Ocean – Get Details Here

An SUV size Asteroid has made a record for coming closer to Earth than any other known Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA). As per the reports, it has passed 1,830 miles (2,950 km) above the Southern Indian Ocean on August 16, 2020, at 12:08 am EDT-Eastern Daylight Time (August 15, at 9.08 pm Pacific Daylight Time).

Near-Earth Asteroids pass by our home planet all the time and at roughly 10 to 20 feet (2 to 6 meters) across, asteroid 2020 QG is considered to be very small by the asteroids standards.

By some of the estimates made, there are hundreds of millions of small asteroids which are the size of 2020 QG but they are difficult to discover until they get very close to Earth. The vast majority of NEA has been safely passing at much greater distances, which is usually farther away than the moon.

Asteroid 2020 QG:

Asteroid 2020 QG has entered the record books as the closest known non-impacting asteroid. Many very small asteroids impact Earth every year but only a few have actually been detected in space a few hours before impacting the planet. On average an asteroid, the size of 2020 QG has passed this closely only a few times a year.

Details of tiny asteroid’s passing by:

Director of the Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, Paul Chodas mentioned that it is really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close because we observed the Earth’s gravity dramatically bend its trajectory.

As per the calculations, this asteroid got turned by 45 degrees or so as it swung by our planet. Zipping along at almost 8 miles per second, which is a little slower than average, 2020 QG was first recorded as just a long streak in a wide-field camera image which was taken by Zwicky Transient Facility. The image was taken six hours after the closest point of approach as the asteroid was heading away from the planet.

Zwicky Transient Facility, a sky scanning survey telescope that has been funded by NASA and National Science Foundation is based at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County.

Near-Earth Object observations Program of NASA also funds data processing for NEO detections. 

What is the significance of finding tiny asteroids?

Paul Chodas further explained that it is quite an accomplishment to find these tiny close-in asteroids as they pass by so fast. He further added that there is typically only a short window of a couple of days before or after a close approach when this form of a small asteroid is close enough to Earth to be bright enough but not so close that it moves too fast in the sky to be detected by the telescope.

Goal of finding near-Earth Asteroids:

Congress in 2005 has assigned NASA the goal of finding 90 per cent of the near-Earth Asteroids that are about 460 feet or larger in size.

These larger asteroids pose a much greater threat if they impact and they can also be detected much farther away from Earth as their rate of motion across the sky is typically much smaller at that distance.