2012 DA14 [Duende]

author: none

Feb 2, 2013


Next Friday, a 150 foot rock of primordial material from the early days of the Solar System will zip by the Earth. There are a lot of these asteroids flying around the Sun. With better and better detection systems, more and more have been located – this one was found last year (hence the name “2012 DA14” ~ now formally called Duende), and got instant attention because it would pass very close to the Earth this year, very close!

Such Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) are located and tracked carefully; they usually get attention (meaning NASA does some very careful math on their orbits) when they go by us at “Lunar Distances” (1.0 LD’s is the distance to the Moon) and there are about NEA 40 passes of less than 60 LD this month.

2012 DA14 has a 0.09 LD pass, which will take it inside the orbit of the weather and communications satellites that hover 22,200 miles over the equator (it’ll pass at 17,200 miles, uncertainty ~100 miles). That this is a “record close approach for a known object of this size” is true but needs some context. Only recently have we started to see these things before they already passed us (especially when they approach from the Sun, where telescopes cannot look), and the only other known object about this size was an impact over Siberia in June 1908 taking out a few hundred square miles of forest.

Most of these objects are loosely packed ice and/or rock conglomerates; Siberia’s came apart some ten of miles over the surface (no trace of it has been found on the ground to date). The Meteor Crater in Arizona was made by a smaller object but it had the energy advantage being almost pure metal, and hitting the ground real good!

For reassurance sake, there are no known objects that present a high impact threat for a few decades (yet). As a final aside, there are some companies starting to figure if they can harvest these things for water and other resources ..