Sunday 29 March 2020

Asteroid 2020 FP5 passes the Earth.

Asteroid 2020 FP5 passed by the Earth at a distance of about 483 20 km (1.26 times the average  distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.32% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly after 2.00 pm GMT on Sunday 22 March 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 FP5 has an estimated equivalent diameter of 2-7 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 2-7 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 more than 36 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's  surface.

The calculated orbit of 2020 FP5. JPL Small Body Database.

2020 FP5 was discovered on 25 March 2020 (three days after its closest encounter with the Earth) by the University of Arizona's Mt. Lemmon Survey at the Steward Observatory on Mount Lemmon in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. The designation 2020 FP5 implies that the asteroid was the 135th object (asteroid P5 - in numbering asteroids the letters A-Y, excluding I, are assigned numbers from 1 to 24, with a number added to the end each time the alphabet is ended, so that A = 1, A1 = 25, A2 = 49, etc, so that P5 = (5 x 24) + 15 = 135) discovered in the second half of March 2020 (period 2020 F).

2020 FP5 has a 526 day orbital period and an eccentric orbit tilted at an angle of 5.35° to the plane of the Solar System, which takes it from 0.90 AU from the Sun (i.e. 90% of he average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 1.64 AU from the Sun (i.e. 164% of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, and outside the orbit of 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 October 2019 and the next predicted in November 2022. 2020 FP5 also has occassional close encounters with the planet Mars, with the last having happened in December 2016.

See also...

https://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2020/03/asteroid-2000-bo28-passes-earth.htmlhttps://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2020/03/asteroid-2020-fd-passes-earth.html
https://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2020/03/asteroid-2020-fc2-passes-earth.htmlhttps://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2020/03/asteroid-2004-re84-passes-earth.html
https://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2020/03/asteroid-531060-2012-dj61-passes-earth.htmlhttps://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2020/03/fragment-of-meteorite-found-in-slovenia.html
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