New Asteroid Made Close-Approach Less than 5,000 Miles from Earth’s Surface
NASA have published data of a very close-approach which occurred on Feb-25 at 19:49Z (note that the asteroid was not discovered until the following day).
The asteroid in question is 2016 DY30 (the 774th <0.5 AU asteroid to be discovered since March 01 2016). Its nominal (expected) close-approach distance was just 4933.546 miles from Earth’s surface. Although small (estimated to be 2-5m in diameter), it was travelling at just over 17km/s (relative to Earth) at the time of its close-approach.
2016 DY30 entered NASA’s all-time close-approaches table at position #5. It is the 6th asteroid, this year, which has found its way on to the ‘top 100’ table. There were 13 new entries in this ‘top 100’ table last year (2015) and 12 entries during 2014.
8 asteroids have made / will make their close-approach of less than 1LD (average distance from Earth to the Moon) during the current +/- 30 days period. 2016 DY30 was the only one of these which was (well) below geo-stationary altitude of 22,236 miles.
Watch the skies…
Editor’s Note: I’ve been noticing this trend that NASA/JPL has adopted of reporting the close passes or near misses a day or more AFTER the event. Now I see from this article that that others as well are starting to notice this behavior. It tends to reinforce the doubt that so many in the public have in the lettered agencies and really begs the question what is really going on and really makes it look as though they are trying hard to prevent people from recognizing there may be a pattern developing.
This shouldn’t be taken lightly as it is happening quite often now where they are only reporting the close flyby’s/near misses AFTER the fact. It’s a literal “heads up!”
