Mini-Asteroid Flying By Earth Tonight

By Nancy Atkinson - November 16, 2010 at 3:26 PM UTC | Planetary Science
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A small asteroid will make a fairly close flyby of Earth tonight, November 16, 2010 at 10:44 p.m. EST (0344 GMT), but it is not a threat to hit the planet. Plus, at 3 meters wide, (10 ft) the asteroid, named 2010 WA, would break apart if it hit Earth's atmosphere. Still, finding and tracking the small asteroid is "good practice in detection," wrote NASA's @AsteroidWatch Twitter feed.

2010 WA will pass about 1/10 lunar distance, or about 38,000 kilometers (24,000 miles) away, and have a magnitude of about 14.5, so it won't be visible "without a good sized telescope" said @AsteroidWatch. But if you do have such a telescope, the asteroid could be seen over the middle to east coast of US.

For references, geostationary satellites are in orbit about 36,000 km (22,350 miles) up, while the International Space Station is about 350 km (220 miles) above Earth.

See more detailed information about

2010 WA on the Minor Planet Center Website

NASA is constantly on the lookout for asteroids, or Near Earth Objects (NEO), and has a mandate by Congress for the "Spaceguard" survey to find all asteroids around 40 meters and larger by 2020.

NASA says several teams of astronomers worldwide are surveying the sky to find NEOs. One of the most most productive NEO surveys is the LINEAR search program of the MIT Lincoln Lab, carried out in New Mexico with US Air Force and NASA support. The LINEAR team, which operates two search telescopes with one-meter aperture. Recently, the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona has been extremely productive, as well. Other active survey groups include the NEAT search program in Hawaii, carried out jointly by the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and the US Air Force; the Spacewatch survey at the University of Arizona, and the LONEOS survey at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. Other astronomers -- many of them amateurs -- follow up the discoveries with supporting observations.

[caption id="attachment_79029" align="aligncenter" width="536" caption="Graph of NEO discoveries. Credit: NASA"]

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To see more details on NEO discoveries,

see this page on the NASA's NEO website.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com