Asteroid 2020 GF1 passed by the Earth at a distance of about 563 100
km (1.47 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon,
or 0.38% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly after 8.35 pm
GMT on Wednesday 8 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 GF1 has an estimated
equivalent
diameter of 11-34 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object
with
the same volume would be 11-34 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 30 and 15 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material
reaching the Earth's surface.
The calculated orbit of 2020 GF1. JPL Small Body Database.
2020 GF1 was discovered on 3 April 2020 (five days before its closest approach to the Earth) by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey,
which is located in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. The
designation 2020 GF1 implies that it was the 30th asteroid (object O1 -
in numbering asteroids the letters A-Y, excluding I, are assigned
numbers from 1 to 24, so that F1 = (24 x 1) + 6 = 30)
discovered in the first half of April 2020 (period 2020 G).
2020 GF1
has an 428 day (1.17 year) orbital period and an eccentric orbit
tilted at an angle of 9.00° to the plane of the Solar System, which
takes it from 0.96 AU from the Sun (i.e. 96% of the average distance
at
which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 1.26 AU from the Sun (i.e. 1.26% of
the
average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, and further from from the Sun than 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 thelast having happened in August 2014 next predicted
in September this year (2020).
See also...
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