Thursday, January 26, 2023

3844 - ASTEROID - near miss in January 2023?

 

                 -  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.

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            -    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.

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            -    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.

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            -    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.

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            -    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”

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            -    "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.

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            -    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.

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            -    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.

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            -   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.

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            -    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.

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            -  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.

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            -    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.

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            -    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.

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            -    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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