Asteroid 2012 BX34

Near-Earth asteroid 2012 BX34

Once again, we did not see the danger coming.
Only an amateur was able to photograph the asteroid 2012 BX34. Yet this near-Earth asteroid had a size of 8-18 meters and came within 76  800 km from Earth, January 27, 2012.
This distance is extremely thin compared to the distances of the solar system.
We have avoided the collision with the asteroid in the day on Friday, January 27, 2012 to 16H, a distance of 0.2 times that of the moon, if one believes NASA page on the near-Earth object (NEO).
Many small rocky bodies called asteroids are present in the solar system, a significant portion of them circulate in a ring between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter between 2 and 4 AU (Symbol: UA) The mean distance from Earth to the Sun. a AU is 149,597,871 km. It is a unit often used for distances in the solar system, or the distance between two stars in a dual system. , in what astronomers call the belt asteroid, also known as main Belt.
It marks the boundary between the terrestrial planets and gas giants. An asteroid is a celestial object is not observable to the naked eye because of its small size, which varies from a few tens of meters to several hundred kilometers in diameter and is part of our solar system.
The objects of less than 50 m in diameter are called meteorites. The size of the object was not enough to do damage to our planet, especially since it probably would not reach the earth's surface, over, he would have fragmented and even sublime.
Let us remember that it is enough of an object 50 meters to make a crater like the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona.
This meteorite, would have produced the same effects as in the fall of the Sikhote-Alin meteorite in 1947. It was fragmented in the atmosphere.

As the astronomer said Gareth Williams of the Minor Planet Center. BX34 2012 is among the 20 NEO who approached most of the Earth since the early observations.
The most worrying from the astronomer is that the future path of the object BX34-2012 is uncertain and hoped it was picked up by radar, which would analyze its orbital elements accurately to calculate the future orbit.

Image: The largest known asteroids (above).

Image: The small signal of the object 2012 BX34 was photographed by an amateur astronomer as a low luminous line.
© Ernesto Guido-Giovanni Sostero-Nick Howes

NB: The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) is a joint research project of the Air Force, NASA and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. LINEAR robotic telescopes have detected the September 15, 2011, 231,082 asteroids, 2,423 NEO discoveries and 279 comets.