(ORDO NEWS) — Asteroid 2022 FD1, discovered by astronomers on the night of March 24-25, flew past the Earth at a distance of about eight thousand kilometers today at noon, according to NASA data.
The diameter of the object is about two to three meters, even if it hit our planet, it would most likely almost completely burn up in the atmosphere.
It is extremely rare for astronomers to discover small potentially dangerous asteroids in advance, before they are near the Earth or enter the planet’s atmosphere. Asteroid 2022 EB5, discovered in mid-March, was only the fifth on this list.
At the same time, bodies about 10-15 meters in size, as shown by the explosion of an asteroid over Chelyabinsk in February 2013, can cause significant damage, even if they are almost completely destroyed in the atmosphere. Read about it in our material “Threat from space“.
The asteroid that flew past the Earth today was first discovered by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky, who worked at the Piskestetö observation station. The asteroid hit the frame late in the evening on March 24th.
Then the data of the Hungarian observer was confirmed by colleagues from Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Britain and other countries.
At 11:04 GMT on March 25, the Minor Planet Center issued a circular confirming the discovery, where instead of the provisional designation Sar2594, the object was assigned the index 2022 FD1.
Calculations show that this body is from 1.7 to 3.8 meters in size (about the size of a car). It already approached the Earth in September 2013 and will approach again in May 2024, but the same extremely close approach as this time is not expected in the near future – the asteroid will pass at a distance of 30 million kilometers.
This Friday, at approximately 09:15 GMT (12:15 Moscow time), the asteroid flew at a distance of 14.8 thousand kilometers from the center of the Earth, that is, approximately 8.4 thousand kilometers from the earth’s surface this is more than half orbits of GPS and Glonass navigation satellites.
Astronomers note that this close date is also interesting because it was a total eclipse of the asteroid – it completely plunged into the shadow of the Earth.
Christian Scharnecki, who first observed 2022 FD1, recently discovered another asteroid – it fell into the ocean near Iceland. The fall of unburned fragments of a celestial body occurred on the night of March 11-12 into the Norwegian Sea.
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