Washington (AFP)
An asteroid three to six meters long passed 2,950 km from Earth on Sunday, according to NASA, which announces that it is the closest asteroid to have ever been observed passing near our planet.
Had it collided with our world, the asteroid, dubbed 2020 HQ, probably wouldn't have done any damage, but its disintegration in the atmosphere would no doubt have created a fireball in the sky, a meteor, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) explains in a statement Tuesday.
The pebble passed over the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday at 04:08 GMT at a speed of 12.3 kilometers per second, a distance well below the geostationary orbit of about 36,000 km where most are flying. telecommunications satellites.
The asteroid was actually spotted six hours after its passage, by the Zwicky Transient Facility, a telescope at the Palomar Observatory at Caltech University in California, as a long, luminous line in the sky.
The US space agency estimates that asteroids of this size graze the Earth at this distance a few times a year.
But they're hard to spot, unless they're heading straight for the globe, in which case the explosion in the atmosphere is usually noticed, as in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, when an object exploded. about 20 meters had shattered the windows for miles, injuring a thousand people.
NASA has among its missions to locate the asteroids, much larger (140 meters), which really threaten the Earth with destruction, but its devices also monitor the smaller ones.
"It's really cool to see a small asteroid come so close, because you can see Earth's gravity curving its path," said Paul Chodas, director of the Center for the Study of Near Earth Objects at NASA.
According to JPL calculations, the asteroid made a 45 degree turn because of our planet.
© 2020 AFP