Haleakala telescope finds asteroid near Earth
2020-OO1 has ‘tiny’ chance to hitting Earth in 2087
An asteroid discovered by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope atop Haleakala on Monday, which has “a tiny probability of hitting Earth in 2087,” will make a close pass this coming Monday, a UH Institute for Astronomy news release said Friday.
The near Earth object, given the temporary name 2020 OO1, has a diameter of about 65 feet — the length of about two school buses. It is similar in size to the asteroid that exploded in the atmosphere over Russia in 2013 that sent a shock wave that blew out the windows of 7,200 buildings across six Russian cities, the UH institute said.
At its closest point, the asteroid will be only about 1.7 times the distance of the moon, the UH institute said.
A short time after the discovery Monday, the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA issued a notification that 2020 OO1 would likely come close to Earth. Several telescopes around the world, including the Canada-FranceHawai‘i
Telescope on Mauna Kea, assisted with rapid follow-up observations to verify the asteroid’s orbit and determine if it was possibly hazardous.
After Pan-STARRS1 identifies an object that might be passing very close to Earth, telescopes on Mauna Kea and elsewhere around the world will stop what they are working on and track the object to determine if it is a possible threat to Earth, the UH institute said.
In this case, with all of the additional observations, including some taken by Hawaii high school students, astronomers have pinned down the orbit of 2020 OO1, the UH institute said. Astronomers will continue to observe the object as it approaches to refine projections. These new observations likely will rule out future impacts.
“Finding these objects is the bread-and-butter work of PanSTARRS,” said UH Institute for Astronomy astronomer Richard Wainscoat, who leads the NEO project with PanSTARRS. “Our mission is to find potentially hazardous asteroids together with the larger telescopes on Mauna Kea, the LCO (Las Cumbres Observatory) global telescope network and our ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System)
project.”
The search for near Earth objects is funded by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office through its NearEarth Object Observations Program.