The asteroid, designated 2020 SW, came within 13 kilometers of Earth at 12:22 p.m. CEST yesterday. The moon is approximately 384 thousand kilometers away from our planet. It was almost certain that the asteroid would miss the Earth. But if that happened, experts believed it would disintegrate in the atmosphere. Its size could be compared to a smaller bus (4 to 9 meters in diameter). The interesting thing is that the object was discovered less than a week before its flyby around the Earth.
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Asteroid 2020 SW from this morning's webcast. 10 second exposure, 2x binning with an SBIG ST-2000XCM and 8" Meade LX200 Classic telescope. The asteroid was tracked using my open source NEOTraker software: https://t.co/CWNIxwVyaE pic.twitter.com/8lXNBfnLFY
— Astronomy Live (@astroferg) September 24, 2020
really really, the problem is small asteroids that we don't know about and they appear unexpectedly.