Friday 1 March 2019

Asteroid 2019 DP passes the Earth.

Asteroid 2019 DP passed by the Earth at a distance of about 1 104 000 km (2.88 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.74% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly after 6.40 pm GMT on Friday 22 February 2019. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though were it to do so it would not have presented a significant threat. 2019 DP has an estimated equivalent diameter of 19-59 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 19-59 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 23 and 5 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.

The calculated orbit of 2019 DP. JPL Small Body Database.

2019 DP was discovered on 26 February 2018 (four days after its closest approach to the Earth) by the Atlas MLO Telescope at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. The designation 2019 DP implies that the asteroid was the 15th object (object P - in numbering asteroids the letters A-Z, excluding I, are assigned numbers from 1 to 25, so that P = 15) discovered in the second half of February 2019 (period 2019 D).

2019 DP has an 406 day orbital period and an eccentric orbit tilted at an angle of 10.4° to the plane of the Solar System, which takes it from 0.81 AU from the Sun (i.e. 81% of the the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 1.34 AU from the Sun (i.e. 134% of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun). It is therefore classed as an Apollo Group Asteroid (an asteroid that is on average further from the Sun than the Earth, but which does get closer). This means that close encounters between the asteroid and Earth are common, with the last having occurred in May 2018 and the next predicted in August 2027.

See also...

https://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/02/asteroid-2019-cy5-passes-earth.htmlhttp://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/02/asteroids-2019-cm5-passes-earth.html
http://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/02/asteroid-2019-cb2-passes-earth.htmlhttp://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/02/fireball-meteor-over-colorado.html
http://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/02/asteroid-2019-av2-passes-earth.htmlhttp://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/02/asteroid-532-herculina-approaches.html
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