There are millions of asteroids already identified, monitored and the calculated orbits show no danger to the Earth. The problem is the unknowns, the ones we don’t see coming towards us. These are rocks giant enough to cause mass extinction events. Yes, they cannot be seen because they are hidden from sunlight.
An example is the 1.5 km wide “potentially dangerous” object, called 2022 AP7. This is one of several large space rocks that astronomers have recently discovered near the orbits of Earth and Venus.
The asteroid "Killer" is en route to Earth
The more we know about our galactic neighborhood, the more we realize that Earth "was lucky." That is, our planet, fortunately, has been safe from catastrophic impacts for many millions of years. However, it is known that it is not in question whether we will be a target for these rocks again, what is in question is when that day will be.
Asteroid 2022 AP7 currently crosses Earth's orbit while our planet is on the opposite side of the Sun, but scientists say that over thousands of years, this rock and Earth will slowly begin to cross the same closest point. thus increasing the chances of a catastrophic impact.
the asteroid, discovered together with two other asteroids near the Earth using the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, it was described in a study published on September 29 in the The Astronomical Journal.
So far we have found two large asteroids close to Earth [NEAs] which are about 1 km in diameter, a size we call planet killer. Planet killer asteroids are space rocks large enough to cause a global mass extinction event if they crush Earth.
Study lead author Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington, DC, in a statement.
Finding these rocks is very complicated
To discover these asteroids, astronomers trained the dark energy camera of the 4-meter Cerro Tololo Víctor M. Blanco telescope in the inner solar system. or The glare of the sun makes observations impossible during most of the day, so the researchers only had two 10-minute twilight windows each night to make their observations.
So far, only about 25 asteroids have been discovered with orbits completely within Earth's orbit due to the difficulty of observing near the Sun's glow. There are likely only a few NEAs of similar size to be found, and these large undiscovered asteroids likely have orbits that keep them within the orbits of the Earth and Venus most of the time.
Sheppard explained.
A NASA tracks the positions and orbits of approximately 28,000 asteroidsfollowing them with ATLAS (Last warning system for asteroid land impact), a set of four telescopes capable of scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours.
The space agency marks any space object within a radius of 193 million km from Earth as "near-Earth object" and classifies any large body within a radius of 7.5 million km of our planet as "potentially dangerous" .
Since ATLAS went online in 2017, has identified more than 700 asteroids near the Earth and 66 comets. Two of the asteroids detected by ATLAS, 2019 MO And 2018 LA, it actually hit Earth, the first exploded off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the second landed near the Botswana-South Africa border. Fortunately, these asteroids were small and did not cause any damage.
In the next 100 years, no known asteroids will collide with Earth, but what about the other asteroids?
NASA has estimated the trajectories of all near-Earth objects beyond the turn of the century. According to NASA, Earth faces no known dangers of apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years. But that doesn't mean astronomers think they should stop looking.
am March 2021for example, a meteor the size of a bowling ball exploded in Vermont with the force of 200 pounds of TNT. Even more dramatically, a 2013 meteorite explosion over Chelyabinsk, Russia, generated an explosion of approximately 400-500 kilotons of TNT, or 26 to 33 times the energy released by the Hiroshima bomband the wounding of approximately 1,500 people.
Space agencies around the world are already working on possible ways to deflect a dangerous asteroid if we ever make it.
On September 26, the spaceship Double Asteroid Redirection Test Redirection (DART). the non-dangerous asteroid Dimorphos, causing it off course, changing the asteroid's orbit in 32 minutes in the first test of the Earth's planetary defense system.
China has also suggested that it is in the early stages of planning an asteroid redirect mission. By launching 23 Long March 5 rockets on asteroid Bennu, which will oscillate within a radius of 7.4 million km from Earth's orbit between 2175 and 2199, the country hopes to deflect space rock from a potentially catastrophic impact with ours. planet. .
