What’s expected?
As predicted by the international agency Nasa, a small asteroid will be moving towards the Earth and there is a 0.41 per cent chance of hitting the planet just before the day US is scheduled to go for presidential election November 3, as per the CNN report.
What is the potential impact?
The object was first identified at Palomar Observatory in California in 2018. According to the US space agency, the asteroid probably won't have a deep impact. They have based the inference on 21 observations spanning 12.968 days.
What zoomed past Earth before this?
In fact, last weekend a car-sized asteroid already flew past our home planet. It is supposed to be the closest flyby of such space rocks on record and scientists didn’t have any information about it until it departed. The asteroid passed 2,950 km above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday at 12.08 am EDT (9.38 pm India time), NASA said.
The initial image of this celestial body, asteroid 2020 QG, was taken by a NASA-funded facility six hours after the closest point of approach as the asteroid was heading away from Earth.
As per the IANS report, the vast majority of Near-Earth Asteroids, or NEAs pass by safely at much greater distances and mostly much farther away than the Moon. By some estimates, there are hundreds of millions of small asteroids the size of 2020 QG.
Asteroid 2020 QG enters the record books as the closest known non-impacting asteroid; however, many very small asteroids cross the planet every year, but only a few have actually been detected in space a few hours before impacting Earth.
It is interesting to note that the SUV-sized asteroid was discovered by two Indian students from IIT-Bombay who belong to Pune and Haryana.
Students named Kunal Deshmukh and Kritti Sharma were working on a research project to hunt for Near Earth Asteroids and discovered the celestial object just hours later using data from the robotic Zwicky Transient Facility, (ZTF), California.