Small asteroid Earth, A car-sized asteroid just made the closest fly-by of Earth

 Small asteroid Earth, A car-sized asteroid just made the closest fly-by of Earth.

2020 QG has a diameter between 3 and 6 m (10-20 feet) and is very small by asteroid standards.

The space rock orbits the Sun at a distance of 1.0-2.9 AU (astronomical units) once every 2.7 years.

Zipping along at almost 12.3 km/s (8 miles per second), 2020 QG was first recorded as just a long streak in a wide-field camera image taken by the Zwicky Transient Facility.

The image was taken 6 hours after the closest point of approach as the object was heading away from Earth.

“If it had actually been on an impact trajectory, it would likely have become a fireball as it broke up in Earth’s atmosphere, which happens several times a year,” NASA astronomers said.

“By some estimates, there are hundreds of millions of small asteroids the size of 2020 QG, but they are extremely hard to discover until they get very close to Earth.”

The vast majority of near-Earth asteroids pass by safely at much greater distances — usually much farther away than the Moon.

“It’s really cool to see a small asteroid come by this close, because we can see the Earth’s gravity dramatically bend its trajectory,” said Dr. Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“Our calculations show that this asteroid got turned by 45 degrees or so as it swung by our planet.”

2020 QG enters the record books as the closest known non-impacting asteroid.

“It’s quite an accomplishment to find these tiny close-in asteroids in the first place, because they pass by so fast,” Dr. Chodas said.

“There’s typically only a short window of a couple of days before or after close approach when this small of an asteroid is close enough to Earth to be bright enough but not so close that it moves too fast in the sky to be detected by a telescope.”