- 3844 - ASTEROID - near miss in January 2023? - Asteroid set to make 'extraordinarily close' approach to Earth tonight, January 26, 2023, Thursday, at 4:17 p.m. EST (2117 GMT). A small asteroid will pass close to Earth on Thursday, not to be seen again until 2036.
--------- 3844 - ASTEROID - near miss in January 2023?
- Asteroid 2023 BU is only about 12 to 26.9
feet in diameter and was discovered less than a week ago on January 21 by
amateur astronomer. The asteroid will
pass less than 6,213.7 miles from Earth's center, about a quarter of the
distance between the planet and its man-made geostationary satellites, which
orbit over the equator at the same speed and direction as Earth.
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- The asteroid is not classified as
dangerous, both because its path will keep it from colliding with Earth and
because it's small enough that it would likely break up and incinerate in
Earth's atmosphere.
-
- Astronomers quickly ruled out 2023 BU as an
impactor, but despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to
predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with
Earth. In fact, this is one of the
closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.
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- Though the asteroid will pass close to the
planet, it will still be a dim object in the sky, difficult to view without a
high-powered telescope. However, the Virtual Telescope Project will livestream
the flyby starting at 11:15 a.m. EST on January 26. The feed will be available
on the project's website. The asteroid
will be closest that day at about 2,200
miles above the planet's surface.
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- The little asteroid once orbited the sun
every 359 days. But its close encounter with Earth will change its path. Deflected
by Earth's gravity, the asteroid's orbit will elongate so that it will take 425
days to go around the sun on future orbits.
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- Asteroid 2023 BU is what is known as an
'Apollo' asteroid, an asteroid whose path takes it across Earth's orbit but on
a more extended path than our own planet's. The next close approach to Earth
will take place on December 6, 2036.
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- A different "planet killer"
asteroid that is hiding in the glare of the sun has finally been detected, and
the giant space rock could smash into Earth one day.
-
- The 0.9-mile-wide "potentially
hazardous" asteroid, named “2022 AP7”, is one of several large space rocks
that astronomers recently discovered
near the orbits of Earth and Venus.
-
- Currently, 2022 AP7 crosses Earth's orbit
while our planet is on the opposite side of the sun, but scientists say that
over thousands of years, the asteroid and Earth will slowly start to cross the
same point closer together, thereby increasing the odds of a catastrophic
impact.
-
- The asteroid, discovered alongside two
other near-Earth asteroids using the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in
Chile. They have found two large
near-Earth asteroids [NEAs] that are about 0.6 mile across, a size that we call
“planet killers”
-
- "Planet killer" asteroids are
space rocks that are big enough to cause a global mass extinction event,
through the chucking up of dust into the upper atmosphere and the blotting out
of the sun's light, if they were to smash into Earth.
-
- To find the asteroids, the astronomers
trained the 4-meter Telescope’s Dark Energy Camera on the inner solar system.
The sun's glare makes observations impossible for most of the day, so the
researchers had just two 10-minute
windows of twilight each night to make their observations.
-
- Only about 25 asteroids with orbits
completely within Earth's orbit have been discovered to date because of the
difficulty of observing near the glare of the Sun.
-
- There are likely only a few NEAs with similar
sizes left to find, and these large undiscovered asteroids likely have orbits
that keep them interior to the orbits of Earth and Venus most of the time.
-
- NASA tracks the locations and orbits of
roughly 28,000 asteroids, following them with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact
Last Alert System (ATLAS), an array of four telescopes that can perform a scan
of the entire night sky every 24 hours.
-
- The space agency flags any space object that
comes within 120 million miles of Earth as a "near-Earth object" and
classifies any large body within 4.65 million miles of our planet as
"potentially hazardous.
-
- Since ATLAS was brought online in 2017, it
has spotted more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets. Two of the
asteroids detected by ATLAS, “2019 MO” and “2018 LA”, actually hit Earth, the
former exploding off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the latter
crash-landing near the border of Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, those
asteroids were small and didn't cause any damage.
-
- NASA has estimated the trajectories of all
the near-Earth objects beyond the end of the century. Earth faces no known
danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years,
according to NASA.
-
- In March 2021, for example, a bowling
ball-size meteor exploded over Vermont with the force of 440 pounds of TNT.
Even more dramatically, a 2013 explosion of a meteor above Chelyabinsk, Russia,
generated a blast roughly equal to around 400 to 500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to
33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomb, and injured around 1,500
people.
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- Space agencies around the world are already
working on possible ways to deflect a dangerous asteroid if one were ever
headed our way. On Septemer 26, 2021, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test
(DART) spacecraft redirected the nonhazardous asteroid Dimorphos by ramming it
off course, altering the asteroid's orbit by 32 minutes in the first test of
Earth's planetary defense system.
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- China has also suggested it is in the early
planning stages of an asteroid-redirect mission. By slamming 23 Long “March 5
rockets” into the asteroid Bennu, which will swing within 4.6 million miles of
Earth's orbit between the years 2175 and 2199, the country hopes to divert the
space rock from a potentially catastrophic impact with our planet. Let's hope
it works!
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January 26, 2022 ASTEROID - near
miss in January 2023?
3844
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--------------------- --- Thursday, January 26, 2023 ---------------------------
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