Asteroid 2020 HV8 passed by the Earth at a distance of about 807 200
km (2.10 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.54% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightlybefore 0.55 am
GMT on Friday 24 April 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 HV8 has an estimated
equivalent
diameter of 5-16 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object
with
the same volume would be 5-16 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.
2020 HV8 was discovered on 28 April 2020 (four 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 HV8 implies that the asteroid was the 213th object (asteroid V8 -
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 V8 = (24 x 8) + 21 = 213) discovered in the second half of April 2020 (period 2020 H).
2020 HV8 has a 5.1 day (1.37 year) orbital period and an eccentric orbit
tilted at an angle of 16.8° to the plane of the Solar System, which
takes it from 0.85 AU from the Sun (i.e. 85% of he average distance at
which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 1.61 AU from the Sun (i.e. 161% of
the
average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, and more than the distance at which the planet Mars 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 2020 HV8 has occassional close encounters with the Earth, with the last having happened in October 2019.
See also...
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