An asteroid with cars made Earth’s nearest air base on record – and NASA did not see it coming

An asteroid with cars made just the closest known approach to Earth, without actually colliding with the planet. And investigators did not even know it for hours until hours after it was already over.

Asteroid 2020 QG, formerly known as ZTFoDxQ, zooms past Earth on Sunday at 12:08 pm EDT, and thus came close to 1,830 miles away. It marks the closest asteroid flyby ever recorded in which the object actually survived, according to NASA.

For comparison, the International Space Station is 254 miles away.

“Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are passing through Earth all the time, but by 2020 QG passed closer to Earth than any other known NEA without actually affecting it,” a NASA spokesman told CBS News on Tuesday.

2020 QG was first observed at the Palomar Observatory, exactly six hours after it crossed the southern Indian Ocean.

“It’s quite an achievement to find these small asteroids nearby in the first place because they pass by so quickly,” said Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at JetAA Propulsion Laboratory. of NASA in Southern California. ‘There is typically only a short window of a few days before or after close approach, when this little one of an asteroid is close to Earth to be bright enough, but not so close that it’s too hard in’ the sky moves to be detected by a telescope. “

The asteroid traveled at 27,600 miles per hour, or nearly 8 miles per second, which NASA said was slightly slower than average. On average, an asteroid of its size passes this just a few times each year.

Because they were only about 10 to 20 feet in diameter, the asteroid was not actually large enough to pose a serious threat. If it had been on a collision course, it would probably have crashed like a fireball – an extremely bright meteor – because it broke up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

The asteroid “approached Earth from the direction of the sun and was not discovered until after it was over and could be observed in the night sky by geothermal observers,” NASA confirmed. “By some estimates, there are hundreds of millions of small asteroids the size of 2020 QG, but they are extremely difficult to detect until they get very close to Earth.”

NASA carefully monitors objects in the Earth’s orbit, but it is only aware of a fraction of them because of such observational limitations.

Scientists at NASA are developing a telescope that could detect asteroids coming from the direction of the sun, and remove the current blind spot in their observations. The Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission could launch in early 2025.

NASA also plans to launch the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) in July 2021. DART will crash intentionally in a harmless asteroid moon in the fall of 2022 to try to change its motion, in the first test for planetary defense.