Small asteroid becomes closest ever seen passing Earth: NASA

This NASA/JPL/ZTF/Caltech Optical Observatories handout image obtained on August 18, 2020 shows asteroid 2020 QG (the circled streak in the center), which came closer to Earth than any other nonimpacting asteroid on record

While I’m told size matters, “nonimpacting” is the key term here. Don’t really care about gross tonnage as long as they keep missing.

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.

As I said, keep on missing. Read the entire article here: Yahoo News

Where’s ChipNASA when we need him? *grin*

Category: NASA, Science and Technology