Wednesday 15 May 2019

Asteroid 2019 JV5 passes the Earth.

Asteroid 2019 JV5 passed by the Earth at a distance of about 481 900 km (1.25 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.32% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly after 2.15 pm GMT on Wednesday 8 May 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 JV5 has an estimated equivalent diameter of 4-16 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 4-16 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 43 and 25 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.

 The calculated orbit of 2019 JV5. Minor Planet Center.

2019 JV5 was discovered on 9 May 2018 (the day after its closest approach to the Earth) by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. The designation 2019 JV5 implies that it was the 141st asteroid (asteroid V5 - 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., which means that V5 = 21 + (24 X 5) = 141) discovered in the first half of May 2019 (period 2019 J).

2019 JV5 has a 642 day orbital period and an eccentric orbit tilted at an angle of 7.60° to the plane of the Solar System, which takes it from 0.83 AU from the Sun (i.e. 83% of he average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 2.08 AU from the Sun (i.e. 208% of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, and considerably 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 occasionally occur, with the next predicted in May 2112.

See also...

http://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/05/fireball-over-lake-michigan.htmlhttp://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/05/asteroid-2018-xg5-passes-earth.html
http://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/05/asteroid-2019-hn3-passes-earth.htmlhttp://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/04/asteroid-2019-gc6-passes-earth.html
http://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/04/asteroid-2019-gs19-passes-earth.htmlhttps://sciencythoughts.blogspot.com/2019/04/asteroid-2019-gt19-passes-earth.html
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