A newly discovered asteroid, about 2 metres wide, passed by Earth today at a distance five times closer than the orbit of satellites GPS.
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The small asteroid called C9FMVU2 was first discovered on Thursday morning (7 September), a few hours before it approached Earth at its closest distance. At 10:25 a.m. the asteroid passed by planet at a distance of just 4,000 kilometres - about 1% of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. For comparison, the satellites of the US GPS constellation used for navigation and positioning are orbiting at an altitude of 20,200 km.
Because the asteroid is so small, it's not a threat for the Earth, says the European Space Agency (ESA) in a Post Thursday at X. If the asteroid collides with the planet, it will simply burn up in the atmosphere of the Earth, creating a spectacular fireball. Presumably some small pieces would fall to the surface of the planet.
According to the Richard Moissl, ESA's head of planetary defence, the passage will significantly affect the asteroid's orbit due to the Earth's gravity.
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According to ESA, C9FMVU2 was too small to be seen by amateur astronomers.
To date, astronomers have discovered more than 30,000 asteroids that are close to Earth. These space rocks grow in size as they approach our orbit. Of these, about 2,300 are considered potentially dangerous, according to the NASA.
An asteroid must be more than 140 metres wide and follow an orbit that takes it to a distance 20 times that of the Moon from Earth in order to be officially labelled "potentially hazardous". Even much smaller asteroids would cause serious damage if they hit the planet. For example, the pressure wave caused by the impact of the single 20-metre-wide Chelyabinsk asteroid exploding in the sky over the southern Russia in 2013, it caused severe damage to thousands of windows and injured around 1,400 people from broken glass thrown into the air.
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Astronomers are therefore working tirelessly to map the population of space rocks near the planet in order to ensure that humanity is not endangered by an unforeseen conflict. In the event that a potentially dangerous rock was on course to collide with Earth, international space agencies services would try to deflect the nearest asteroid with a mission similar to that of the spacecraft Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) NASA, which last year successfully converted the orbit of the small asteroid Demorphus.
