IIT Bombay students discover closest known asteroid to fly by Earth

IIT Bombay students discover closest known asteroid to fly by Earth

Sunday, 16^th August was Kritti Sharma’s third day on a research project to search for Near Earth Asteroids. She and Kunal Deshmukh were analysing ZTF data on Sunday afternoon, they reported five “streaks” in the data as potential asteroids. Little did they know that one of them was a record-breaking asteroid. “The data looked like all other Near Earth Asteroids we have seen so far”, said Kunal – a final year student in the department of Metallurgy and Materials Science at IIT Bombay. After the ZTF team reported their finding to the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center, several telescopes followed up to learn more about the asteroid's size and orbit, proving that it had passed very close to Earth. Kritti was overjoyed: “Helping make a discovery like this, so early in my research project, is beyond what I had ever imagined!”, said the third year undergraduate student of IIT Bombay’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. Their advisor, Prof. Varun Bhalerao, is very proud. He said, “It is wonderful to see 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 is about 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 meters) across, or roughly the size of an SUV, so it was not big enough to do any damage even if it had been pointed at Earth; instead, it would have burned up in our planet's atmosphere.

"The asteroid flew close enough to Earth that Earth's gravity significantly changed its orbit," says 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. Asteroids of this size that fly roughly as close to Earth as 2020 QG do occur about once a year or less, but many of them are never detected.

"ZTF's large-field of view and rapid data processing allows it to find rare asteroids like this that other telescopes might not find," says George Helou, ZTF co-investigator and director of IPAC, an astronomy center, at Caltech.

ZTF, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other collaborators, scans the entire northern sky every three nights in search of supernovas, erupting stars, and other objects that otherwise change or move in the sky. As part of a NASA-funded program, ZTF team members search for near-Earth asteroids. When these space rocks speed across the sky, they leave streaks in the ZTF images. Each night, machine-learning programs automatically sort through about 100,000 images in search of these streaks, and then narrow down the best asteroid candidates to be followed up by humans. This results in about 1,000 images that team members and students sort through by eye every day.

Asteroid 2020 QG was identified by Kunal Deshmukh, a student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Deshmukh had been scanning that day's images along with Kritti Sharma, also at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and Chen-Yen Hsu at National Central University in Taiwan.

"A lot of the streaks are satellites, but we can quickly go through the best images by eye to find the actual asteroids," says Bryce Bolin, postdoctoral scholar in astronomy at Caltech and a member of the ZTF team, who regularly hunts for asteroids. "This latest find really demonstrates that ZTF can be used to locate objects very close to Earth that are on potentially impacting trajectories." After the ZTF team reported their finding to the International Astronomical Union Minor Planet Center, several telescopes followed up to learn more about the asteroid's size and orbit.

GROWTH-India is a partnership between the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, with support from the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF) and the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India (https://sites.google.com/view/growthindia/). It is a part of the international GROWTH collaboration. Caltech's ZTF is funded by the NSF and an international collaboration of partners. Additional support comes from the Heising-Simons Foundation and from Caltech. ZTF data are processed and archived by IPAC. NASA supports ZTF's search for near-Earth objects through the Near-Earth Object Observations program.

Coverage by various media outlets:

• Caltech press release

• Insight, IIT Bombay (archived)

• Times of India - IIT-Bombay students help discover closest asteroid to fly by earth (archived)

• Indian Express - IIT Bombay students discover 2020 QG, closest known asteroid to fly by Earth (archived)

• MSN - 2 IIT-Bombay students in team that identified asteroid that flew past earth (archived)

• Deccan Herald - IIT Bombay students discover closest known asteroid to fly by Earth (archived)

• Hindustan Times - 2 IIT-Bombay students in team that identified asteroid that flew past Earth (archived)

• Firstpost Tech2 - IIT-Bombay students discover closest asteroid flyby of Earth ever recorded, experts confirm (archived)

• The Tribune - Asteroid which ruffled Earth's gravity [sic] discovered by IIT-B students (archived)

• Times Now News - 2 IIT-Bombay students credited with discovering closest asteroid known to fly past Earth (archived)

• Free Press Journal - 2 IIT Bombay students find asteroid that came close to earth on Sunday (archived)

• The Weather Channel - IIT Bombay Students Spot Closest-Known Asteroid to Fly Past Earth (archived)

• Phys.org - Robotic telescope finds closest known asteroid to fly by Earth (archived)

• Scienceblog.com - ZTF Finds Closest Known Asteroid to Fly By Earth (archived)

• Indiatimes - Car-Sized Asteroid Which Flew Past Earth Unnoticed By NASA [sic] Was Discovered By IIT Bombay Students (archived)

• Inshorts - IIT Bombay students discover closest known asteroid to fly by Earth (archived)

Tweets

• https://twitter.com/iitbombay/status/1296703643370967041

• https://twitter.com/weatherindia/status/1296791720659574790

• https://twitter.com/aparanjape/status/1296429017940336640