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Up to date: Sep 23, 2020 17:59 IST
Washington [US], September 23 (ANI): A small near-Earth asteroid (or NEA) will briefly go to Earth‘s neighbourhood on Thursday, September 24, zooming previous at a distance of about 13,000 miles (21,000 kilometres) above our planet’s floor.
The asteroid will make its shut method under the ring of geostationary satellites orbiting about 22,000 miles (36,000 km) away from Earth.
Scientists estimate that 2020 SW is roughly 15-30 ft (5-10 meters) in measurement, based mostly on its brightness — or concerning the measurement of a small college bus. Though it is not on an affect trajectory with Earth, if it had been, the house rock would nearly definitely break up excessive within the ambiance, changing into a vivid meteor often called a fireball.
“There are numerous tiny asteroids like this one, and several other of them method our planet as shut as this a number of occasions yearly,” mentioned Paul Chodas, director of the Heart for Close to-Earth Object Research (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “In reality, asteroids of this measurement affect our ambiance at a mean fee of about as soon as yearly or two.”
After asteroid 2020 SW was found on September 18 by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, follow-up observations confirmed its orbital trajectory to excessive precision, ruling out any probability of affect. CNEOS scientists decided that it’ll make its closest method at 4:12 am. PDT (7:12 am EDT [11:12 UTC]) on September 24 over the Southeastern Pacific Ocean. After Thursday’s shut method, the asteroid will proceed its journey across the Solar, not returning to Earth‘s neighborhood till 2041, when it should make a way more distant flyby.
In 2005, Congress assigned NASA the objective of discovering 90 per cent of the near-Earth asteroids which might be about 460 ft (140 meters) or bigger in measurement. These bigger asteroids pose a a lot better risk in the event that they had been to affect, and they are often detected a lot farther away from Earth as a result of they’re merely a lot brighter than the small ones. It’s thought that there are over 100 million small asteroids like 2020 SW, however they’re very onerous to find until they get very near Earth.
“The detection capabilities of NASA’s asteroid surveys are regularly bettering, and we must always now anticipate finding asteroids of this measurement a few days earlier than they arrive close to our planet,” added Chodas. (ANI)
