Tomorrow, an asteroid measuring 13-28 meters, roughly the size of an adult blue leviathan, is expected to pass close to Earth. The space object moves at a speed of 33,012 km/h, three times the speed of sound and will reach its closest point from the Earth, which is 4.3 million kilometers away (8 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon).
True, it is a large distance, but by cosmic standards it is a very small distance.
The information on the current asteroid is part of a large NASA project to map all near-Earth objects that are within 193 million kilometers of it.
In addition, NASA marks as dangerous all the objects located at a distance of 7.5 million kilometers from the Earth when the agents of the agency are following them. Although apparently this is a great distance, a change in the trajectory of one of these large objects can still happen that will bring it even closer and even collide with Earth.
Today, about 28,000 objects are sold that the agency's Atlas system tracks with a delay.
The system consists of four telescopes that scan the sky all the time.
This is a system capable of passing all objects once every 24 hours and since its activation in 2017 it has discovered about 700 near-Earth asteroids as well as 66 comets.
Two of these asteroids, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, actually hit the Earth.
The first crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico and the second in the area of the country of Botswana in Africa.
Fortunately, these were two small objects that did not cause much damage.
The good news from NASA's system is that, at least in the next hundred years, there is no nearby space object within the range of a collision with the Earth that could endanger humanity. However, this does not mean that we should stop looking. Destroyed is not currently on the agenda, but the history of asteroid strikes on Earth is alarming enough that we will always be checking the skies above for a threat to humanity.
If a dangerous asteroid is found on its way to Earth, today there are studies working to investigate how such an object can be diverted from its collision course when an experiment in diverting an asteroid is in progress.
In 2021, NASA launched a spacecraft that makes its way to the DART double asteroid pair, where an experiment will be carried out in the fall of this year to crush a small spacecraft on the Dimorphos asteroid in order to try to divert it from its orbit. From its trajectory and what are the results of crashing a spaceship on such a space object.
Were we wrong?
We will fix it!
If you found an error in the article, we would appreciate it if you shared it with us