Discovered June 16th, large asteroid to pass between Earth and moon on Saturday
An asteroid named 2024 MK, over 120 meters wide, will pass close to Earth. Despite no impact threat, it underscores the need for asteroid monitoring. Astronomers will study it using radar telescopes.
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An asteroid larger than 120 meters wide, named 2024 MK, will pass within 290,000 km of Earth on Saturday. Discovered just days before its closest approach, this sizable asteroid poses no threat of impact but serves as a reminder of the potential dangers posed by space rocks. Experts emphasize the importance of monitoring such objects, as even larger asteroids could go unnoticed until it's too late. The upcoming close encounter coincides with Asteroid Day, highlighting the ongoing efforts to detect and potentially mitigate the risk of asteroid impacts. While 2024 MK won't be visible to the naked eye, astronomers plan to study it using radar telescopes. This event precedes other significant asteroid encounters, including the notorious Apophis in 2029. Despite the potential risks, space agencies like NASA are actively working to identify and track potentially hazardous asteroids to safeguard Earth from future impacts.
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9 commentsI've said this before. The way they find these things is looking for movement against the distant background / starfield. That works pretty well for finding things, but there is one problem. Any object on a collision course with earth will NOT be moving across the background in the days leading up to the collision. It will appear stationary against the stars, so will not be detected by these systems. To some extent it also doesn't matter that we are orbiting the sun because while near, earth and asteroid will be in the same accelerating reference frame.
Another way to model it is to think of firing a projectile from earth into deep space and see how that tracks against the background. That'd be the reverse scenario and there will be no relative motion until it's far enough to not get the same influence from the sun.
Is that bad? According to NASA, "If a rocky meteoroid larger than 25 meters but smaller than one kilometer ( a little more than 1/2 mile) were to hit Earth, it would likely cause local damage to the impact area. We believe anything larger than one to two kilometers (one kilometer is a little more than one-half mile) could have worldwide effects."
So... it would really suck if it hit a populated area, though that's unlikely.
I wonder if it has since been updated to account for different disaster scenarios. It would be good to know, if you're storing 5 redundant copies of something critical, that all 5 copies won't be under 10 feet of water if an asteroid strikes one of the poles and melts all that pole's ice.
I can't imagine what data would be so critical that it's important to make sure it survives such an event, but that hasn't stopped googlers over-engineering internal things in the past.
>> Asteroid Day, sanctioned by the United Nations, was started in 2014 by astrophysicist and former Queen musician Brian May along with Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart along with a few others. The goal is to inform the public about asteroids and their potential threats as well as calling on governments to work on asteroid detection programs.
If you look: https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8...
You will see this was actually spotted back in 2014, but only seen for a few days. When an object is only observed for a few days we generally cannot compute an orbit for it, there is just not enough data to pin it down. However during this current pass of it (the last time it will come by for at least a few centuries), we have enough observations to pin its orbit down. Note that a lot of this is automated nowadays, with automatic observation and "interesting" objects being flagged automatically. There are a lot of small rocks up there (sub 100m).
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