Friday 31 March 2023

Asteroid 2023 FH7 passes the Earth.

Asteroid 2023 FH7 passed by the Earth  distance of about 166 000 km (43% of the the average distance between the Earth and the Moon or 0.11% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), with a velocity of about 8.69 km per second, slightly before 6.10 pm GMT on Thursday 30 March 2023. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though were it to do so it would not have presented a significant threat. 2023 FH7 has an estimated equivalent diameter of 3-10 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 3-10 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) more than 31 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.

The relative positions of 2023 FH7, the Earth, and the Moon on at 6.00 pm on Thursday 30 March 2023. JPL Small Body Database.

2023 FH7 was discovered on 28 March 2023 (two days before its closest approach to 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 2023 FH7 implies that the asteroid was the 183rd object (asteroid H7 - in numbering asteroids the letters A-Z, excluding I, are assigned numbers from 1 to 25, with a number added to the end each time the alphabet is ended, so that A = 1, A1 = 26, A2 = 51, etc., which means that H7 = (25 x 7) + 8 = 183) discovered in the second half of March 2022 (period 2022 F - the year being split into 24 half-months represented by the letters A-Y, with I being excluded).

2023 FH7 is calculated to have a 1176 day (3.22 year) orbital period, with an elliptical orbit tilted at an angle of 1.11° to the plain of the Solar System which takes in to 0.98 AU from the Sun (98% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) and out to 3.38 AU (3.38 times the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, or more than twice the distance at which the planet Mars orbits). 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). 

The orbits and relative positions of 2023 FH7 and the Earth on at 6.00 pm on 30 March 2023JPL Small Body Database.

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