[meteorite-list] Closest Asteroid Yet Flies Past Earth (Asteroid 2003 SQ222)

From: Steve Schoner <steve_schoner_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:28:20 2004
Message-ID: <20031002204656.85864.qmail_at_web12708.mail.yahoo.com>

Makes one wonder if the recent spate of fireballs are
somehow related to this.

Steve Schoner


--- Ron Baalke <baalke_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
> This object is listed on our Earth Close Approach
> Tables:
>
> http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/neo/close.html
>
> 2003 SQ222 passed by the Earth at 0.2 lunar
> distances. It is only
> about 3 to 6 meters in diameter.
>
> Ron Baalke
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994228
>
> Closest asteroid yet flies past Earth
> Jeff Hecht
> New Scientist
> October 2, 2003
>
> An asteroid about the size of a small house passed
> just 88,000 kilometres
> from the Earth by on Saturday 27 September - the
> closest approach of a
> natural object ever recorded. Geostationary
> communication satellites circle
> the Earth 42,000km from the planet's centre.
>
> The asteroid, designated 2003 SQ222, came from
> inside the Earth's orbit and
> so was only spotted after it had whizzed by. The
> first sighting was on
> Sunday 28 by the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth
> Object Search program in
> Arizona, US.
>
> Amateur astronomer Peter Birtwhistle of Great
> Shefford, Berkshire, UK, then
> photographed it on Monday 29. This provided data
> that helped Brian Marsden,
> of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
> to calculate its orbit.
>
> The asteroid's 1.85-year orbit is quite eccentric,
> indicating it cannot be a
> man-made object, Marsden says. He estimates the
> asteroid measured less than
> 10 metres. This is too small to have posed a danger
> to Earth, although it
> would have made a spectacular
>
> The passage came at about 2300 GMT, only 10 hours
> after a bright fireball
> streaked over the Orissa region of India. Indian
> villagers have found pieces
> of the meteorite, which reportedly cause two house
> fires. However, this
> event was not connected to the fly past of 2003
> SQ222, says Marsden.
>
> The previous record for closest approach of an
> asteroid - 108,000km measured
> from the centre of the Earth - was set in 1994 by
> another 10m object named
> 1994 XM1.
>
> But the third-closest approach - at 120,000km - was
> object 2002 MN, which
> was about 80m in diameter. If on target, that could
> have exploded in the
> Earth's lower atmosphere and devastated a couple of
> thousand square
> kilometres on the ground.
>
> Another small asteroid, 2003 SW130, missed the Earth
> by 160,000km on 19
> September, making it a busy month for asteroid
> watchers.
>
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Received on Thu 02 Oct 2003 04:46:56 PM PDT