Question

How close has the asteroid Hermes gotten to the Earth?

Answer 1

Hermes

The asteroid Hermes is an object in outer space measuring 1350 feet in radius named after Hermes Greek goddess.

Hermes passed the Earth at approximately double the distance to the moon on 30 October 1937 which is equal to 610,000km from Earth

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#Love cosmology

Answer 2

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Published:

Oct 31, 2003

The Curious Tale of Asteroid Hermes

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For the next few days backyard astronomers can see for themselves the long lost asteroid Hermes.

NASA

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October 31, 2003: It's dogma now: an asteroid hit Earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. But in 1980 when scientists Walter and Luis Alvarez first suggested the idea to a gathering at the American Association for Advancement of Sciences, their listeners were skeptical. Asteroids hitting Earth? Wiping out species? It seemed incredible.

Right: from "Dino Killer" by artist Don Davis.

At that very moment, unknown to the audience, an asteroid named Hermes halfway between Mars and Jupiter was beginning a long plunge toward our planet. Six months later it would pass 300,000 miles from Earth's orbit, only a little more than the distance to the Moon. Rhetorically speaking, this would have made a great point in favor of the Alvarezes. Curiously, though, no one noticed the flyby.

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1980 wasn't the first time Hermes had sailed by unremarked. Hermes is a good-sized asteroid, easy to see, and a frequent visitor to Earth's neighborhood. Yet astronomers had gotten into the habit of missing it. How this came to be is a curious tale, which begins in Germany just before World War II:

On Oct. 28, 1937, astronomer Karl Reinmuth of Heidelberg noticed an odd streak of light in a picture he had just taken of the night sky. About as bright as a 9th magnitude star, it was an asteroid, close to Earth and moving fast--so fast that he named it Hermes, the herald of Olympian gods. On Oct. 30, 1937, Hermes glided past Earth only twice as far away as the Moon, racing across the sky at a rate of 5 degrees per hour. Nowadays only meteors and Earth-orbiting satellites move faster.

Plenty of asteroids were known in 1937, but most were plodding members of the asteroid belt far beyond Mars. Hermes was different. It visited the inner solar system. It crossed Earth's orbit. It proved that asteroids could come perilously close to our planet. And when they came, they came fast.

Reinmuth observed Hermes for five days. Then, to make a long story short, he lost it.