Wednesday 23 March 2016

Asteroid 2016 EM156 passes the Earth.

Asteroid 2016 EM156 passed by the Earth at a distance of 531 500 km (1.38 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 0.56% of the average distance between the Earth and the Sun), slightly before 6.25 am GMT on Wednesday 16 March 2016. There was no danger of the asteroid hitting us, though had it done so it would have presented only a minor threat. 2016 EM156 has an estimated equivalent diameter of 4-15 m (i.e. it is estimated that a spherical object with the same volume would be 4-15 m in diameter), and an object of this size would be expected to explode in an airburst (an explosion caused by superheating from friction with the Earth's atmosphere, which is greater than that caused by simply falling, due to the orbital momentum of the asteroid) in the atmosphere between 43 km and 26 km above the ground, with only fragmentary material reaching the Earth's surface.

The calculated orbit of  2016 EM156JPL Small Body Database.

2016 EM156 was discovered on 14 March 2016 (two days before its closest approach to the Earth) by the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey, which is located in the Catalina Mountains north of Tucson. The designation 2016 EM156 implies that it was the 3912th asteroid (asteroid M156) discovered in the first half of March 2016 (period 2016 E).

2016 EM156 has a 1032 day orbital period and an eccentric orbit tilted at an angle of 1.78° to the plane of the Solar System that takes it from 0.96 AU from the Sun (i.e. 96% of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun) to 3.04 AU from the Sun (i.e. 304% of the average distance at which the Earth orbits the Sun, slightly more than twice the distance at which Mars orbits the Sun). It is therefore classed as an Apollo Group Asteroid (an asteroid that is on average further from the Sun than the Earth, but which does get closer). This means that close encounters between the asteroid and Earth are extremely common, with the last having occurred in June 1999 and the next predicted in June 2027. 2015 EM156 also has occasional close encounters with the planet Mars, with the next predicted in February 2028.  

See also...

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