A few hours ago a small, newly discovered asteroid “grazed” the Earth. It is about theasteroid 2024 GJ2wide between 2.3 meters and 5 meters and discovered just three days ago, on April 9, 2024, by Pan-Starrs telescope 2 in Hawaii. The point of closest proximity between the asteroid occurred at hours 8.28pm Italian yesterday April 11th at a distance of “just” 12,298 km, comparable to the diameter of the Earth. The asteroid hurtled past theAustralia at a speed of 14.4 km/s (51,840 km/h). The event, although close, it did not pose any danger and there has never been a risk of impact with our planet, as also underlined by theEuropean Space Agency in a post on X.
The asteroid belongs to the so-called Near-Earth Objects (“near-Earth objects”), i.e. celestial bodies orbiting the Sun whose orbit intersects that of the Earth and which never move too far from our planet. In particular, it is a Apollo-type asteroidthat is, whose minimum distance from the Sun does not go beyond that ofaphelion terrestrial, i.e. the point of the Earth’s orbit furthest from the Sun at 1.017 astronomical units (the astronomical unit is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun and is worth 149.6 million km).
GJ2 is the 25th asteroid known to fly past Earth within lunar distance (average 384,400 km) since the start of the year, and so far it has the closest flyby of the year. The asteroid passed within the orbit of the geostationary satellites (about 35,700 km away from Earth) fortunately without causing any damage to the artificial satellites present there.
The asteroid is currently located approximately 676,000 km from Earth in the constellation Pisces. The next close encounter of this small celestial body with our planet will take place in 2093 at a minimum distance of 205,947 km.
But what would have happened if the asteroid, instead of continuing into space, had come into contact with the Earth’s atmosphere and crashed to Earth? In all likelihood, absolutely nothing. Having a diameter of only a few meters, 2024 GJ2 would be completely disintegrated in the atmosphere due to friction with the latter due to the high speed. The numbers may vary, but in general they are at least necessary 20 meters in diameter so that something from a celestial body falling to Earth actually manages to reach the surface of our planet.
