I know, I know… One disaster at time. But this is 2020! Disasters come in bunch. Like apples. And just like bunches of apples, there are always a few that aren’t quite ripe. That is this asteroid.
On September 2nd, 2020, an asteroid, (2011 ES4), will fly by between Earth and the Moon. Not quite ripe for an impact, but it’ll be close.
2011 ES4 is about 25-50m across. It will pass by the Earth at about 30,000mph according to some reports. It orbits the Sun every 415 days.
And while this time it will be close, orbital mathematics suggests a 1-in-19,000 shot that it does collide with Earth. The next closest pass come sin the 2050s.
For comparison, there is about a 1-in-15,000 shot that you find a pearl in an oyster.
From NASA:
With an average interval of about 10,000 years, rocky or iron asteroids larger than about 100 meters would be expected to reach the Earth’s surface and cause local disasters or produce the tidal waves that can inundate low lying coastal areas. On an average of every several hundred thousand years or so, asteroids larger than a kilometer could cause global disasters.
In this case, the impact debris would spread throughout the Earth’s atmosphere so that plant life would suffer from acid rain, partial blocking of sunlight, and from the firestorms resulting from heated impact debris raining back down upon the Earth’s surface. Since their orbital paths often cross that of the Earth, collisions with near-Earth objects have occurred in the past and we should remain alert to the possibility of future close Earth approaches.
It seems prudent to mount efforts to discover and study these objects, to characterize their sizes, compositions and structures and to keep an eye upon their future trajectories.
But don’t worry. The flip side of that math says there is a 99.9946-percent chance the asteroid will miss the Earth.
