Asteroid 2020 DV3 passed by the Earth at a distance of about 407 000
km (1.06 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or
0.27% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly before 7.15 am
GMT on Tuesday 25 February 2020. There was no danger of
the asteroid hitting us, though were it to do so it would not have
presented a significant threat. 2020 DV3 has an estimated
equivalent
diameter of 5-17 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object
with
the same volume would be 5-17 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 40 and 25 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material
reaching the Earth's surface.
The calculated orbit of 2020 DV3. JPL Small Body Database.
2020 DV3 was discovered on 27 February 2020 (two days after its closest approach to the Earth) by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey,
which is located in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. The
designation 2020 DV3 implies that it was the 93rd asteroid (object V3 -
in numbering asteroids the letters A-Y, excluding I, are assigned
numbers from 1 to 24, so that V3 = (24 x 3) + 21 = 93)
discovered in the second half of February 2020 (period 2020 D).
2020 DV3
has an 568 day (1.80 year) orbital period and an eccentric orbit
tilted at an angle of 1.09° to the plane of the Solar System, which
takes it from 0.79 AU from the Sun (i.e. 79% of the the average distance
at
which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 2.18 AU from the Sun (i.e. 218% of
the
average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, and further from from the Sun than the planet Mars). 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 fairly common, with the
last having occurred in February 2011 and the next predicted
in March 2029. 2020 DV3 also has occasional close encounters with the planet Mars, with the next predicted for May 2029.
See also...
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