Close asteroid fly-by will help test planetary defence capabilities

The asteroid, which is between 10 and 30m across, will fly close to the Earth on 12th October. Although NASA’s astronomers are certain it will not hit the planet — unlike the slightly smaller rock that burned up in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013 — they do not yet know exactly how close the body’s orbit will bring it to us; their only certainty is that the distance will be between 6800km and 270,000km from Earth's surface.

Usually, close asteroid approaches such as this are used to gather data to characterise them, but in this case researchers at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will also test the equipment and procedures that would be used in case of an unexpected and potentially catastrophic heavenly body encounter.

"This is the perfect target for such an exercise because while we know the orbit of 2012 TC4 well enough to be absolutely certain it will not impact Earth, we haven't established its exact path just yet," said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at JPL. "It will be incumbent upon the observatories to get a fix on the asteroid as it approaches, and work together to obtain follow-up observations than make more refined asteroid orbit determinations possible."