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The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [16] [17] [18] An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [19]
The asteroid belt is the smallest and innermost known circumstellar disc in the Solar System. Classes of small Solar System bodies in other regions are the near-Earth objects , the centaurs , the Kuiper belt objects, the scattered disc objects, the sednoids , and the Oort cloud objects.
In 1950 Jan Oort suggested the presence of a cometary reservoir in the outer limits of the Solar System, the Oort cloud, [108] and in 1951 Gerard Kuiper argued for an annular reservoir of comets between 40 and 100 astronomical units from the Sun having formed early in the Solar System's evolution, but he did not think that such a belt still ...
The asteroid had a close approach to the Earth on 29 May 2012, approaching to only ~8950 miles (~14,440 km) above the planet's surface. This means 2012 KT 42 came inside the Clarke Belt of geosynchronous satellites. In May 2012, the estimated 5- to 10-metre-wide asteroid ranked #6 on the top 20 list of closest-approaches to Earth.
A list of known near-Earth asteroid close approaches less than 1 lunar distance (384,400 km or 0.00257 AU) from Earth in 2012. [note 1] Rows highlighted red indicate objects which were not discovered until after closest approach Rows highlighted yellow indicate objects discovered less than 24 hours before closest approach
The listed objects currently include most objects in the asteroid belt and moons of the giant planets in this size range, but many newly discovered objects in the outer Solar System are missing, such as those included in the following reference. [58]
2012 BX 34 is a small Aten asteroid that made one of the closest recorded asteroid close approaches of Earth on 27 January 2012. It passed within 0.0004371 AU (65,390 km ; 40,630 mi ) of Earth during its closest approach at 15:25 GMT.
2012 TC 4 is a tumbling micro-asteroid classified as a bright near-Earth object of the Apollo group, approximately 10 meters (30 feet) in diameter. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] It was first observed by Pan-STARRS at Haleakala Observatory on the Hawaiian island of Maui , in the United States.