That was a near miss! Would the asteroid have completely burnt up in earth's atmosphere? How many close by flights do we miss?
This asteroid was discovered by human researchers in India and Taiwan scanning that day's images. High time to employ computer vision and machine learning to do this automatically.
"On August 16, the ... Palomar Observatory ... spotted an asteroid that had, just hours earlier, traveled only 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above Earth's surface. The previous known record-holder is asteroid 2011 CQ1, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2011, which passed above Earth about 1,550 miles (2,500 kilometers) higher than 2020 QG. Asteroid 2020 QG is about 10 to 20 feet (3 to 6 meters) across, or roughly the size of an SUV, so it was not big enough to do any damage even if it had been pointed at Earth; instead, it would have burned up in our planet's atmosphere. ... Asteroid 2020 QG was identified by Kunal Deshmukh, a student at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Deshmukh had been scanning that day's images along with Kritti Sharma, also at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and Chen-Yen Hsu at National Central University in Taiwan."
ZTF Finds Closest Known Asteroid to Fly By Earth | www.caltech.edu
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