At its closest point, an asteroid traveling at more than 30 times the speed of sound will be within about 3.2 million kilometers from Earth. This distance is approximately 8 times the average distance between Earth and the moon.
This may sound like a huge gap, but by cosmic standards, it’s actually a stone’s throw away. Fortunately, according to NASA, the asteroid is expected to glide past our planet without risk of impact.
Read also; Amazing Asteroid Apophis, Here Are 10 Asteroids That Threaten Earth in 2020
Quoted from SINDOnews from the Live Science page, Wednesday (27/4/2022), NASA marks every space object within 193 million km from Earth as a “near-Earth object”. Then fast-moving objects within 7.5 million km as “potentially dangerous.”
Once an object is tagged, astronomers monitor it closely, looking for deviations from its predicted trajectory that could put it on a collision course with Earth. The asteroid that will launch on Thursday, April 28, 2022, may not be the largest space rock to slide past Earth.
Because, there will be a larger asteroid that glides near Earth, namely asteroid 467460 (2006 JF42). The asteroid is estimated to have a diameter of between 380 and 860 meters and is traveling at a speed of about 40,700 km/h when it passes Earth on May 9, 2022.
Read also; Alert, 25,000 Dangerous Asteroids Estimated to Threat Earth
(wib)
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