A space rock, with a diameter of about five meters, passed by the Earth a few days ago. Only four rocks similar to it have come close to Earth since monitoring began
Avi Blizovsky
In the picture, the tiny rock is close to the illuminated object to which the arrow is directed
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A space rock, with a diameter of about five meters, passed by the Earth a few days ago. Only four rocks similar to it have come close to Earth since monitoring began.
The rock, dubbed 2003 SW130, is too small to cause any damage. If it entered Earth's atmosphere, it would break up into a spectacular meteor display. However, its discovery demonstrates how astronomers make such rocks effective in situ, even if they are the size of a living room or a bus.
Half of the ten known times such rocks have hit Earth have been discovered in the past two years. The rock was discovered about 21 hours after its closest approach to the asteroid by Ariana Glearson and Tom Gehrels who observed it using a 1.8 meter telescope in Arizona, which belongs to the Spacewatch project.
The next night, the Klet observatory in the Czech Republic actually saw it too. He was almost engulfed in the light of Mars which was next to him in the sky. The observations showed that the object approached the Earth at a distance of 168 thousand kilometers at 06:00 GMT on September 19. The orbit of the object brings either the greatest proximity to the sun in the orbit of Venus and the greatest distance, a little after the orbit of the Earth.
Astronomers are recently finding greater efficiency in detecting small rocks moving towards Earth. Last year, they spotted 2002 XV90 and 2002 MN, which occupy second and third place on the list of objects that have come closest to Earth. The closest object to date, 1994 XM1 approached to 112 thousand kilometers. This is of course in addition to the objects that hit the Earth from time to time like the one that hit Tunguska in 1908.
Brian Marsden, from the Minor Planet Center in the US says: "There must be many tiny objects like 2003 SW130 that pass us closer than the Moon and miss. The Space Watch did a good job when it discovered the object and Kellett Observatory did it again when it was able to locate it. A wonderful match - even if the bone itself would have most likely burned up high in the atmosphere if it had hit," he says.
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