(CNN) – On April 29, an asteroid estimated between 1.7 kilometers long and 4.1 kilometers wide will fly over Earth. But it is not expected to collide with our planet, fortunately. If it does, the asteroid is “large enough to cause global effects”, said NASA, when he first discovered it.
The asteroid is called 52768 (1998 OR2) and was first seen in 1998. It will pass 6.29 million kilometers from Earth, moving at more than 31,000 kilometers per hour.
The overflight is expected to occur on Wednesday, April 29 at 4:56 a.m. ET, according to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, which tracks bodies or elements that could collide with Earth.
The asteroid was classified as a potentially dangerous object because it passes near Earth’s orbit, but is currently not in the list of possible future NASA Earth impact events. Those are grouped and monitored by the Sentry system from NASA, “a highly automated collision monitoring system that continuously scans the most current catalog of asteroids in search of future impact with Earth over the next 100 years.”
It is the largest asteroid that is expected to fly over Earth in the next two months, but it is not the largest.
That honor belongs to asteroid 3122 Florence (1981 ET3), which flew over our planet and fortunately did not collide with Earth on September 1, 2017. It will happen again on September 2, 2057. It is estimated that that asteroid is 2.5 kilometers long. Long and almost 9 kilometers wide.
In addition to tracking near-Earth objects that could pose a threat, NASA and other agencies currently have ongoing missions to study near-Earth asteroids and potentially mitigate the danger of a collision. The observatory is located on Cerro Pachón hill, in the center-north of Chile.
Knowing the size and orbit of an asteroid is the main battle, as this allows the prediction of near-Earth objects.
This year, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory it will be online and will allow the discovery of tens of thousands of asteroids in orbits that could bring them closer to Earth, said Ed Lu, executive director of the Asteroid Institute and former NASA astronaut.
“It is an exciting time for planetary defense because we are on the verge of an absolute flood of new observations that will allow us to track 10 times more asteroids than we have traced before,” said Lu.
Missions such as OSIRIS-REx from NASA and Hayabusa2 from Japan are exploring asteroids in our solar system and aim to return samples to Earth in the coming years. The camera of near-Earth objects, called NEOCam, is characterizing near-Earth objects.
Other missions are also planned. NASA’s DART, which means Double Asteroid Redirect Test, is a planetary defense test to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth. DART, which has a launch window that will open in July 2021, will visit a binary asteroid system where two asteroids orbit each other and seek to deflect a small asteroid.
DART will crash into a moon (a small natural satellite) from the asteroid near Earth Didymos, which is comparable in size to an asteroid that could pose a threat.
The complementary mission Hera of the Space Agency European it will measure precisely how the velocity of the largest asteroid changed and study the DART impact crater on the moon.
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