Asteroid Approaching Earth — Visible During Spring Festival

Tourism Center / Taipei Report

An asteroid will approach Earth and can be seen in Taiwan during the Spring Festival holiday. According to estimates by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Near-Earth Object Program Office, the roughly 45-meter-diameter asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass within just about 34,100 kilometers from Earth’s center and approximately 27,700 kilometers from Earth’s surface at 3:26 AM Taipei Time on February 16. This is the closest approach of an object of this size since systematic monitoring of near-Earth objects began in the 1990s.


▲ An asteroid will approach Earth and can be seen in Taiwan during the Spring Festival holiday. (Photo / Provided by Taipei City Government)

This asteroid, 2012 DA14, which is about half the size of the entire Taipei Astronomical Museum building, will reach a brightness of magnitude 7 to 7.5 in the minutes around its closest approach to Earth. It can be observed with binoculars or a small telescope, but only as a bright dot — not its actual shape.

Additionally, because it moves very quickly across the sky at a speed of 7.8 kilometers per second from south to north, observers on Earth will see it move roughly 1 degree relative to the background stars every minute. Therefore, using continuous video recording is recommended to more easily capture the asteroid’s movement. Practice a few times in advance to avoid being caught off guard and unable to keep up with its speed.

Asteroid 2012 DA14 was discovered on February 23, 2012, by astronomers from the La Sagra Sky Survey in southern Spain and was later reported to and confirmed by the Minor Planet Center (MPC). Calculations show that this asteroid takes about 368 days to orbit the Sun, just slightly longer than Earth’s 365.25-day orbit. As a result, it actually approaches Earth once every year, but the approach on the morning of February 16, 2013, will be the closest.

This extremely close encounter not only gives astronomers the opportunity to study some of the asteroid’s physical properties up close, but Earth’s gravitational pull will also cause its orbital period to shorten drastically to 317 days. This changes its classification from an Apollo-type asteroid to an Aten-type asteroid, and it will not come as close again for at least the next 30 years. The next such close approach is estimated to occur on February 16, 2046, at a distance of about 60,000 kilometers from Earth’s center.

The close approach of 2012 DA14 marks the nearest recorded encounter of a known 50-meter-class asteroid with Earth. There are other known asteroids that have come even closer to Earth, but most are much smaller than 2012 DA14. Astronomers estimate that events involving 50-meter-class asteroids approaching Earth occur roughly once every 40 years, while impacts by asteroids of this size are far rarer, happening on average only once every 1,200 years. If an asteroid the size of 2012 DA14 were to impact Earth, it could cause localized damage comparable to the area of a single district in Taipei City.