[meteorite-list] Close Call - An Asteroid Zooming Through Our Neighborhood (2003 SQ222)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:28:21 2004
Message-ID: <200310031906.MAA19339_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

I received a call from US News this morning about asteroid
2003 SQ222. Here's the article they wrote about it.

Ron Baalke

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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/nycu/tech/nextnews/nexthome.htm

An asteroid zooming through our neighborhood
Close Call
By James M. Pethokoukis
US News
October 3, 2003

While we were all focused the past few days on such important issues as Rush
Limbaugh's ESPN comments, the California recall, and, of course, the
bizarre occurrence of both the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox making
baseball's play-offs, most of us overlooked this little nugget of news
coming from the Near Earth Object program at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. Late on September 27, asteroid SQ222 passed about 88,000
kilometers from Earth-or just over a fifth of the distance between Earth and
the moon . The NEO lists SQ222 as the closest approach by an asteroid ever
recorded.

According to the Great Shefford Observatory, a private astronomical
observatory in West Berkshire, England, the asteroid was 4 to 8 meters
in diameter and-here's the worrisome part-was discovered 11 hours after
scooting by Terra. To see a picture of this bad boy, click here:

http://www.birtwhi.demon.co.uk/Gallery2003SQ222.htm

According to the NEO office, had SQ222 smacked into Earth, it wouldn't have
caused any damage; it would have produced a bright fireball in the sky, and
a few small fragments would have fallen to Earth. For an asteroid to
cause climate damage on a global scale and be classified as "potentially
hazardous" by the NEO office, it would have to be at least 150 meters in
diameter.

Far smaller ones, however, can do plenty of harm. Barringer Crater in Arizona
is 570 feet deep and nearly a mile wide. It was created 50,000 years ago
by an object that was an estimated 50 meters in diameter, weighed roughly
300,000 tons, and was traveling at a speed of 40,000 miles per hour. The
force generated by its impact was equal to the explosion of 20 million
tons of TNT.

Right about now, some space junkies reading this column may be thinking to
themselves, "What about Aug. 10, 1972?" That was when a daylight fireball
flashed through the skies of the western United States and Canada and was
photographed by a tourist at Grand Teton National Park. The object was
an estimated 10 meters in diameter. The NEO doesn't list that event as a
"close approach" because it doesn't have an identifiable orbit for the
object. SQ222, for instance, is scheduled to return on April 25, 2005 -
but 40 times farther away.
Received on Fri 03 Oct 2003 03:06:10 PM PDT