Asteroid 2024 HO2 passed by the Earth at a distance of about 37 400 km (0.10 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.025% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), with a velocity of about 9.244 km per second, slightly before 3.20 pm GMT on Monday 29 April 2024. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though were it to do so it would not have presented a significant threat. 2024 HO2 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 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.
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2024 HO2 was discovered on 30 April 2024 (the day after 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 2024 HO2 implies that it was the 64th asteroid (object O2 - 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 O2 = 14 + (25 x 2) = 64) discovered in the second half of April 2024 (period 2024H - the year being split into 24 half-months represented by the letters A-Y, with I being excluded).
2024 HO2 has a 226 day (0.62 year) orbital period, with an elliptical orbit tilted at an angle of 9.18° to the plain of the Solar System which takes in to 0.44 AU from the Sun (44% of the distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun and slightly inside the aphelion distance of Mercury) and out to 1.02 AU (2% further away from the Sun than the Earth). Although it does cross the Earth's orbit and is briefly further from the Sun on each cycle, 2024 HO2 spends most of its time closer to the Sun than we are, and is therefore classified as an Aten Group Asteroid.
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This means that close encounters between the asteroid and Earth are fairly common, with the last thought to have happened in May 2021 and the next predicted in January 2026. 2024 HO2 also has frequent close encounters with the planet Venus, with the last thought to have occurred in August 2000 and the next predicted for October 2032.
See also...
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