Travelers In The Night

Thirty six hours before my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rik Hill discovered it, a space rock about size of a Toyota Prius passed about 14,000 miles above the Earth's surface. When Rik first spotted it this small asteroid was about a million miles from us and was moving away from the Earth at 12.6 miles per second. Its orbit had been changed by a narrow escape from the Earth's gravity and it was on a new path around the Sun This small space rock was subsequently observed by telescopes in Russia and Arizona. The Minor Planet Center used these observations to calculate an orbit and give it the name 2015 SK7.2015 SK7 survived it's 2015 encounter with planet Earth. It may not be so lucky the next time.