Impact 2052

2021 QM1 was initially discovered on 28 August 2021 by the Mount Lemmon observatory, located north of Tucson, Arizona. To start, nothing stood out as unusual about the discovery – about a dozen new near-Earth asteroids are discovered every dark night. Routine follow-up observations were then acquired from telescopes around the globe, but these started to tell a more worrying story.

“These early observations gave us more information about the asteroid’s path, which we then projected into the future,” said Richard Moissl, ESA’s Head of Planetary Defence.

“We could see its future paths around the Sun, and in 2052 it could come dangerously close to Earth. The more the asteroid was observed, the greater that risk became.”