Editor's note: As asteroids go, "small" is defined as having an absolute magnitude (brightness) calculated at greater than H=22.0, which converts very roughly to a diameter under 135 meters. No matter how close they come to the Earth, the astronomical community does not classify such objects as "potentially hazardous." However, as demonstrated by the mile wide (1.6 km.) Barringer Crater in Arizona, blasted out by a "small" asteroid some 50,000 years ago, there are asteroids too small to be labeled "potentially hazardous" that actually could cause severe local damage. These are sometimes called "Tunguska-class objects" (TCOs), after the 1908 event probably caused by a comet fragment or asteroid too small to be classified today as hazardous but packing enough wallop to flatten a Siberian forest area the size of a large city.
NEODyS in December 2005 changed its main Risk page to classify "
Objects too small to result in heavy damage on the ground" as having "
absolute magnitude > 25," which corresponds to perhaps 35 meters wide. And JPL two months earlier started flagging (with a blue background) risk-listed objects of "
Estimated diameter 50 meters or less" as "
not likely to cause significant damage in the event of an impact, although impact damage does depend heavily upon the specific (and usually unknown) physical properties of the object in question."
Small asteroids that come close enough to Earth to be seen have significant potential for scientific study today, and for exploration and exploitation in the future. They present a sampling of distant asteroid populations and a few may be remnants of the event that created the Earth-Moon system.
Some of these objects are discovered while close to Earth moving across the sky quite quickly, when they are called "FMOs" or "VFMOs" (very fast moving objects). The discovery and follow-up tracking of asteroids with H>22.0 represents some of the most difficult and very best observing work being done today by amateur and professional astronomers around the world, and the page you are reading is dedicated to recognizing their ongoing successes.
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