Wednesday 25 November 2020

Asteroid 2020 VX4 passes the Earth.

Asteroid 2020 VX4 passed by the Earth at a distance of about 405 400 km (1.06 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.27% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly before 9.10 pm GMT on Wednesday 18 November 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 VX4 has an estimated equivalent diameter of 6-19 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 6-19 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) between 40 and 24 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.

 
300 second image of 2020 VX4 taken with the Elena Planetwave 17" Telescope at Ceccano in Italy. The satellite 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. Gianluca Masi/Virtual Telescope.

2020 VX4 was discovered on 13 November 2020 (five 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 2020 VX4 implies that the asteroid was the 123rd object (asteroid X4 - 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 G4 = (25 x 4) + 23 = 123) discovered in the first half of November 2020 (period 2020 V - the year being split into 24 half-months represented by the letters A-Y, with I being excluded).

 
The closest approach of 2020 VX4 to the Earth on 18 November 2020. JPL Small Body Database.

2020 VX4 has a 496 day (1.36 year) orbital period, with an elliptical orbit tilted at an angle of 7.15° to the plain of the Solar System which takes in to 0.76 AU from the Sun (76% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) and out to 1.69 AU (169% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, and more than the distance at which the planet Mars orbits the Sun). 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 Asteroid 2020 VX4 has occasional close encounters with the Earth, with the most recent having happened in October 2016, and the next predicted for November 2028. The asteroid also has occasional close encounters with the planet Venus, with the next predicted in April 2026.

 
The orbit and current position of 2020 VX4. The Sky Live 3D Solar System Simulator.

See also...














Follow Sciency Thoughts on Facebook.

Follow Sciency Thoughts on Twitter.