IIT Bombay Students Spot Closest-Known Asteroid to Fly Past Earth

Two students from the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay—Kunal Deshmukh and Kriti Sharma—have been credited with the invention the closest asteroid to ever fly past Earth. The car-sized space rock, named 2020 QG, gone by our planet on Sunday, August 16. Its discovery has since created tons of buzz round the world, as scientists had no clue about this passerby until it crossed us.

Soon after its discovery, the asteroid was declared the closest asteroid to fly past Earth, without falling into the earth . As per NASA, it flew 2,950 kilometres above the southern Indian Ocean . The previously known record-holder is asteroid 2011 CQ1, which passed above Earth at about 2,500 kilometres above 2020 QG.

According to a press release from IIT Bombay (IITB), the asteroid 2020 QG was identified by Kunal Deshmukh, a final year student within the Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science. Deshmukh had been scanning that day's images along side Kriti Sharma, also a student at IIT-B, and Chen-Yen Hsu at the National Central University in Taiwan.

The asteroid was spotted employing a wide-field sky astronomical survey facility named Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). Based in California, it uses a telescope to look at and find rare asteroids which will go unnoticed by other telescopes.

Every day, this facility captures nearly 1,00,000 images of streaks that are left by the asteroids that speed across the sky. The researchers from IITB noticed five such streaks within the data as potential asteroids, and afterward , one among them was confirmed to be the asteroid 2020 QG.

“The data seemed like all other Near-Earth Asteroids we've seen thus far ,” said Kunal.

Soon after spotting the asteroid, the ZTF team reported their findings to the International Astronomical Union asteroid Center, after which several telescopes followed up to find out more about the rock's size and orbit.

"The asteroid flew close enough to Earth that Earth's gravity significantly changed its orbit," said ZTF co-investigator Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics at Caltech and a senior research scientist at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA.

Kriti Sharma, a third-year undergraduate student at IIT-B’s Department of engineering and therefore the co-discoverer of the asteroid, stated: “Helping make a discovery like this, so early in my scientific research , is beyond what I had ever imagined!”

Their advisor, Prof. Varun Bhalerao, is of course pleased with his students' feat. He said, “It is wonderful to ascertain these students coming from diverse backgrounds and contributing to astrophysics research. We are very excited about our next phase: studying such objects with the robotic GROWTH-India Telescope at Hanle, Ladakh”.

Asteroid 2020 QG has been estimated to be 3 to six meters across in size, which has led to its comparison to an SUV. As per researchers, it had been not large enough to cause damage to the earth . In fact, asteroids of this size tend to fly past Earth at similar proximity about once a year. By some estimates, there are many many small asteroids the dimensions of 2020 QG, but they're extremely hard to identify until they get very on the brink of Earth