Friday 29 April 2016

Asteroid 2016 HO passes the Earth.

Asteroid 2016 HO passed by the Earth at a distance of 808 600 km (2.10 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.54% of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly before 12.30 pm GMT on Sunday 24 April 2016. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though had it done so it would have presented no threat. 2016 HO has an estimated equivalent diameter of 14-45 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 14-45  m in diameter), and an object of this size would be expected to explode in an airburst (an explosion caused by superheating from friction with the Earth's atmosphere, which is greater than that caused by simply falling, due to the orbital momentum of the asteroid) in the atmosphere between 28 and 10 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.

 The calculated orbit of  2016 HOJPL Small Body Database.

2016 HO was discovered on 24 April 2016 (the day of its closest approach to the Earth) by the Southern Observatory for Near Earth Asteroids Research (SONEAR) at Oliviera in Minas Gerais State, Brazil. The designation 2016 HO implies that it was the 14th asteroid (asteroid O) discovered in the second half of April 2016 (period 2016 H).

2016 HO has a 673 day orbital period and an eccentric orbit tilted at an angle of 1.56° to the plane of the Solar System that takes it from 1.01 AU from the Sun (i.e. 101 % of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 2.00 AU from the Sun (i.e. twice the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, considerably outside the orbit of the planet Mars). It is therefore classed as an Amor Group Asteroid (an asteroid which comes close to the Earth, but which is always outside the Earth's orbit). This means that close encounters between the asteroid and Earth are fairly common, with the most recent having occurred in June 2005 next predicted in June 2027. 2016 HO also has occasional close encounters with the planet Mars, with the last such encounter calculated to have occured in October 1962 and the next predicted for April 2024.

See also...

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