2020. What a year! But think positive.
No swarms of locusts here ... yet. And no asteroid has hit us. But asteroid traffic in Earth’s neighborhood is unusually busy:
AUGUST 2020:
In August 2020, an asteroid the size of an SUV came extremely close to hitting our planet. Near Earth Asteroids, or NEAs, pass by our home planet all the time. But an SUV-size asteroid set the record this past weekend for coming closer to Earth than any other known NEA: It passed 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday, Aug. 16 at 12:08 a.m. EDT (Saturday, Aug. 15 at 9:08 p.m. PDT).
NASA didn’t see it until it had passed us ... the Palomar Observatory didn’t detect the zooming asteroid until about six hours after the object’s closest approach. “The asteroid approached undetected from the direction of the sun,” Paul Chodas, the director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, told Business Insider. “We didn’t see it coming.” If NASA couldn’t see the asteroid that almost hit us in August before it passed, what else can’t they see?
SEPTEMBER 2020:
An asteroid the size of a short school bus just discovered on September 18th came close to the Earth last week. According to NASA, passing within 13,000 miles of the Earth’s surface, closer than many weather satellites. At more than 17,000 mph. But too small be a serious threat even if it hit us.
Two other very large asteroids passed by earlier this month. of damage One is about 426 feet in diameter and the other 656 feet in diameter. Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza is 455 feet tall.
The first asteroid passed by Earth on September 25 at a distance of 3.6 million miles, according to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks and predicts asteroids and comets that will come close to Earth. The second larger asteroid flew by on September 29 at a closer distance of 1.78 million miles. Watched the Trump-Biden "debate" for a while, and then kept going!
OCTOBER 2020:
In October 2020, an “unknown object” (2020 SO) is expected to enter our gravitational field and become a temporary “mini-moon", which could stay in orbit of our planet until May next year. While we have "The Moon", apparently a pile of worthless dust, our planet regularly gets many small asteroids and meteors which caught in its orbit, which astronomers call ‘mini-moons’.
NOVEMBER 2020:
In November 2020, we are being told a small asteroid will come very close to our planet on November 2, a day before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the Center for Near Earth Objects Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed. The asteroid known as 2018VP1, first identified at Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, has a diameter of 0.002 kilometers (over 6.5 feet), according to the data. 2018 VP was observed 21 times over 13 days, which allows its orbit to be calculated fairly precisely -- it takes 2 years (plus or minus 0.001314 years, or +/- 12 hours) to go around the Sun. This asteroid is also too small to seriously hurt us.