Near Earth Objects - Tuesday, October 14th, 2015

by Dr. Tony Phillips.

All Sky Fireball Network

 

Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.

On Oct. 14, 2015, the network reported 37 fireballs.

(29 sporadics, 5 Southern Taurids, 1 epsilon Geminid, 1 Orionid, 1 lambda Draconid)

In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]

Near Earth Asteroids

 

Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.


On October 15, 2015 there were 1623 potentially hazardous asteroids.Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:

Asteroid	Date(UT)	Miss Distance	Size
2015 TN21	Oct 10	2.3 LD	17 m
2015 TB25	Oct 11	9.5 LD	55 m
2015 TK21	Oct 12	4.8 LD	24 m
2015 TG24	Oct 12	4 LD	19 m
2015 TC25	Oct 13	0.3 LD	5 m
2015 TC179	Oct 14	12.3 LD	25 m
2015 TG144	Oct 16	13.3 LD	32 m
2011 QD48	Oct 17	67.5 LD	1.0 km
2014 UR	Oct 18	3.8 LD	21 m
2011 SE97	Oct 18	11.9 LD	50 m
2015 TD144	Oct 20	11.7 LD	131 m
2001 UY4	Oct 21	58.2 LD	1.0 km
2015 TZ143	Oct 22	4.2 LD	24 m
2015 TB145	Oct 31	1.3 LD	455 m
2015 TD179	Nov 4	10.6 LD	52 m
2005 UL5	Nov 20	5.9 LD	390 m
2003 EB50	Nov 29	48.8 LD	2.2 km
2007 BG29	Dec 1	54.1 LD	1.1 km
1998 WT24	Dec 11	10.9 LD	1.1 km

Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach.