On August 16 2020, An asteroid sized 3 to 6 metres (10 to 20 feet) was found just 2950 km above the Earth's surface! The astonishing discovery was recorded by the students of IIT Bombay and Taiwan.
Helping make a discovery like this, so early in my research project, is beyond what I had ever imagined
-Sharma,
a third-year student of mechanical engineering at IIT-B.
Named 2020QG, the closest asteroid ever to be found near Earth without impacting it became an early success for the students. The discovers Kunal Deshmukh and Kritti Sharma and Chen-Yen Hsu at National Central University in Taiwan are a part of an international team seeking out Near-Earth Asteroids.
| This is the first image of Asteroid 2020 QG, captured by Caltech's Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) after the asteroid's closest approach to Earth at a distance of 1,830 miles above the planet's surface. The asteroid shows up as a streak because it is closer than the background stars, and zipped past ZTF's camera. Credit: ZTF/Caltech Optical Observatories |
They used data from the robot Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a robotic survey camera located at Palomar Observatory near San Diego. They spotted the asteroid hours after it made its record-setting pass of Earth.
The asteroid 2020QG was close enough to change its orbit due to Earth's gravitational influence. It got turned by 45 degrees or so as it swung by our planet. As per a statement by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the discovered asteroid is not a threat for Earth. It is common for small asteroids to be close to Earth but go unnoticed, making this a rare finding!
The ZTF scans the sky for researching supernovae, stars and other objects that change or move in space. The discovery of 2020QG proved ZTF to be capable of detecting asteroids.
"It's quite an accomplishment to find these tiny close-in asteroids in the first place because they pass by so fast"
- Paul Chodas,
Director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS),
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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