(143649) 2003 QQ47

Description

was discovered on 24 August 2003. It was added to the Sentry Risk Table on 30 August 2003. By 31 August 2003 (with an observation arc of 7 days) the odds of an impact on 21 March 2014 were already reduced to 1 in 1.7 million. The asteroid was removed from the Sentry Risk Table on 14 September 2003, indicating there is no risk of an impact by it in the next 100 years.

safely passed within 0.1283 AU of Earth on 26 March 2014. With an observation arc of 10 years and an orbital uncertainty of 0, its orbit and future close approaches are well-determined.

Preliminary reports

On 3 September 2003 a NASA press release wrote,

has a diameter of approximately 1.24 km, and a mass of approximately . If it were to hit the Earth, it would be a major event, with an energy of approximately 350,000 megatons of TNT (1.5 ZJ), enough to cause global damage.

Sara Russell, a meteorite researcher at London's Natural History Museum, told the BBC on 2 September 2003 that she was not worried that would be a danger; "The odds are very, very low ... We have to keep some kind of perspective", she said.

As a result of the press coverage of asteroids such as , astronomers are now planning to re-word the Torino scale, or to phase it out completely in favour of a scale that is less likely to generate false alarms that may reduce public confidence in genuine alerts.

Binary system

A minor-planet moon orbiting was first detected on 29 August 2021, by Petr Pravec, Peter Kušnirák, Kamil Hornoch, and others using photometric data from ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. The discovery was announced on 17 September 2021. The secondary measures a third the size of its primary (Ds/Dp-ratio of 0.33), resulting in a mean-diameter of approximately 310 meters. It is estimated to be tidally locked, orbiting 1.4 km from the primary every 13.065 hours. The primary has a rotation period of hours and a derived diameter of kilometers, for a resulting effective diameter (system) of kilometers.

In fiction

• The asteroid was mentioned in Anonymous Rex (Les Reptilians) (2004) as the asteroid which the dinosaurs were counting on to destroy human civilization.
• The Korean drama My Love from the Star also mentions it as the asteroid that will allow Do Min-joon to travel back to his home planet.

References

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030906072157/http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news138.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=6 September 2003

|url-status=dead}} (5.7e-07 = 1 in 1,754,000 chance)

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