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...
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