Asteroid 2022 CL7 passed by the Earth at velocity of 9.98 km per second and a distance of about 83 800 km (0.22 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.06% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly after 3.40 pm GMT on Monday 14 February 2022. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though were it to do so it would not have presented a significant threat. 2022 CL7 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) more than 36 above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.
2022 CL7 was discovered on 14 February 2022 (the day of 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 2022 AY5 implies that it was the 188th asteroid (object L7 - in numbering asteroids the letters A-Y, 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 L7 implies the 188th asteroid (L7 = (25 x 7) + 11 = 188) discovered in the first half of February 2022 (period 2022 C - the year being split into 24 half-months represented by the letters A-Y, with I being excluded).
2022 CL7 has a 777 day (2.13 year) orbital period, with an elliptical orbit tilted at an angle of 6.99° to the plain of the Solar System which takes in to 0.90 AU from the Sun (91% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) and out to 2.0 AU (240% 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 2022 CL7 has occasional close encounters with the Earth, with the most recent having happened in October 2019, and the next predicted for March 2046.
See also...
Follow Sciency Thoughts on Facebook.
Follow Sciency Thoughts on Twitter.
