05 February 2011

Previously Undiscovered NEO Asteroid 2011 CQ1 Just Misses Earth! Meteor/Meteorite News 5FEB2011

Asteroid 2011 CQ1 4FEB2011 (c) 2011 NASA/JPL
Meteor/Meteorite News 5FEB2011
Cosmic NEO Asteroid "Sofa"- A "Near-Miss" Narrowly Misses      

Very Small Asteroid Makes Close Earth Approach on February 4, 2011
Don Yeomans and Paul Chodas
NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office
February 4, 2011
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 it a time inside the Earth's orbit. ...
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news170.html


(2011 CQ1) 2011-Feb-040.00010.030.99 m - 2.2 m32.19.69
(c) NASA/JPL/CalTech 2011website for more information:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/ca/

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, I saw this with my own eyes. I didnt believe it at first, then I read up on it when I got home. It was moving VERYYYYYY fast, looked a bit closer than what is shown.

Anonymous said...

I saw a fireball at 9:19pm on Feb 5 going East over the Hudson River from Jersey City. It was low flying, but didn't look like it was going really fast (it took about 2 minutes to span the 3 mile river. So many people live in the area- I know I can't be the only person who saw this!