Asteroid 2020 JA passed by the Earth at a distance of about 239 100
km (0.62 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or
0.15% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly after 8.00 pm
GMT on Sunday 3 May 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 JA has an estimated
equivalent
diameter of 7-21 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object
with
the same volume would be 7-21 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 37 and 20 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material
reaching the Earth's surface.
300 second image of 2020 GN2 taken with the Elena Planetwave 17" Telescope at Ceccano
in Italy on 16 April 2020. The asteroid is the small point at the
centre of the image, indicated by the white arrow, the longer lines are stars, their elongation being
caused by the telescope tracking the asteroid over the length of the
exposure. The line across the bottom right section of the image is a satellite that moved across the field of vision during the exposure. Gianluca Masi/Virtual Telescope.
2020 JA was discovered on 1 May 2020 (two days before its closest encounter with the Earth) by the University of Hawaii's PANSTARRS telescope. The
designation 2020 JA implies that it was the first asteroid (asteroid A)
discovered in the first half of May 2020 (period 2020 J).
2020 JA has a 2044 day (5.60 year) orbital period, with an elliptical
orbit tilted at
an angle of 5.89° to the plain of the Solar System which takes in to
0.72 AU from the Sun (72% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the
Sun, and slightly outside the orbit of the planet Venus) and out to 5.58 AU (558% of the distance at which the Earth orbits
the sun and further from the Sun than the planet Jupiter). 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). 2020 JA also has occassional close encounters with the planet Jupiter, with
the next predicted for February 2073.
See also...
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