[neo_followup] ZTF09p2 5% chance of Earth impact yesterday

[Sam Deen]

Hi all,
Usually, reporting potential impact chances comes after a bit more than 4 observations over a period of 30 seconds, but this object that ZTF found yesterday, and reported far too late yesterday, seems to be a decent exception. The object was observed moving around 200 arcminutes per hour over the observation time, which really doesn't leave much room for it to be further away than a few lunar distances at the observation time.
The timing of the 4 observations gives some cause for suspicion, with pairs of observations each only 0.9 seconds apart, but considering there's a multi-arcsecond difference between said observations, I expect it could very well just be measurement of a streak caused by the high motion.
According to CNEOS, 5% of the virtual orbit solutions give impacting solutions, and fitting the observations to an impact in find_orb seems to fall somewhere on the west coast of the US (I invite others to double check that) with an absolute magnitude of around 34 +/- 1. Normally, I would discount something with that tiny an absolute magnitude as unprovable for an impact, but considering the well-observed region of the west coast, I imagine getting some accurate impact times, trajectories, and locations should allow it to be checked against the AMS's prolific US fireball logs from 2020/01/16.

~Sam
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