CLOSE APPROACHING ASTEROID Feb. 4th around 19:40UT at a distance of 11855 km.

A small (4-5 meter) asteroid discovered earlier today by R. A. Kowalski of the Catalina Sky Survey will pass by Earth on Feb. 4th around 19:40UT at a distance of 11855 km. 2011 CQ1 will not hit Earth, but it will pass well inside the Clarke Belt of geosynchronous satellites.

Source:
remanzacco.blogspot.com...
(also quoted by SpaceWeather.com ). Not a big asteroid, however interesting as we only "discovered" the asteroids hours before the close encounter. Maybe this is due to the small size of asteroid (I hope)

reply to post by Romanian


Nice find!! That isn't very big, so it probably isn't a big danger to anybody, but I wonder if it could impact any of our space junk?

reply to post by getreadyalready


Yes, it is quite close to the orbit of our satellites . An impact like that would not only destroy the sat but also create a large amount of chaotic junk..

reply to post by Romanian


That is what I was thinking. Even if it doesn't strike an active satellite, it could strike and/or disorient all of the other space junk lying around and cause a shower to come into the atmosphere, or cause junk that is being tracked to suddenly change trajectory and put the ISS or other things in danger.

On that altitude we have the GPS satellites , sure we do not know all about as it is so much military involved here..

6,000 to 12,000 miles - Asynchronous Orbits For navigation, the U.S. Department of Defense built the Global Positioning System, or GPS. The GPS uses satellites at altitudes of 6,000 to 12,000 miles to determine the exact location of the receiver.

Originally posted by getreadyalready
reply to post by Romanian

 

That is what I was thinking. Even if it doesn't strike an active satellite, it could strike and/or disorient all of the other space junk lying around and cause a shower to come into the atmosphere, or cause junk that is being tracked to suddenly change trajectory and put the ISS or other things in danger.

Well yes it could.... But the odds of that are fantastically small even with the ever increasing amount of junk up there... The distances between each piece is simply massive - there are hardly any accidental collisions with the stuff that spends decades up there orbiting alone... So something small whipping past like that right out where the human amount of junk is at it's very thinnest.. The odds are so very very tiny.

NASA are reporting that the asteroid made a much closer approach than was expect - just 5480 km, and the encounter changed the orbit of the asteroid by a massive 60 degrees!

Asteroid 2011 CQ1 was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on February 4 and made a record close Earth approach 14 hours later on February 4 at 19:39 UT (14:39 EST). It passed to within 0.85 Earth radii (5480 km) of the Earth's surface over a region in the mid-Pacific. This object, only about one meter in diameter, is the closest non-impacting object in our asteroid catalog to date. Prior to the Earth close approach, this object was in a so-called Apollo-class orbit that was mostly outside the Earth's orbit. Following the close approach, the Earth's gravitational attraction modified the object's orbit to an Aten-class orbit where the asteroid spends almost all of its time inside the Earth's orbit.

Source: NASA