The asteroid, which is wider than two American Football fields, crossed Earth on Thursday (4/8) at 12:23 am ET or 11.23 WIB. The asteroid is known as 2022 OE and was only discovered on July 26, 2022 by the US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Collect Live Science, the asteroid is 170 meters long and 380 meters wide. It is twice the width of an American Football field.
Astronomers from NASA also classified the asteroid 2022 OE2 into the Apollo class asteroid. It is a term for an asteroid that orbits the Sun and crosses Earth’s orbit.
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The asteroid impact was actually quite large, namely the release of energy from more than a thousand nuclear bombs. But the asteroid 2022 OE2 will only pass by Earth, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Asteroid 2022 OE2 passes Earth at a speed of 5.1 million km per hour or 13 times the average distance between Earth and the Moon. In addition, the distance is also further than the distance of the asteroid 2022 NF which crossed Earth on 7 July with a distance of 90 thousand km.
NASA itself continues to monitor tens of thousands of near-Earth objects such as these asteroids and has been estimating their trajectories over the next 100 years. The good news is that Earth is still safe from catastrophic asteroid impacts for the next 100 years.
However, astronomers remain on high alert. The reason is, small changes in trajectory can change the orbit of a large asteroid that has the potential to threaten Earth. Small changes that can be caused for example through a collision with a small asteroid or the gravitational pull of a planet.
Launch Space, the asteroid 2022 OE2 is one part of the celestial phenomenon that occurs this August. On Friday (5/8), for example, there will be a half-bright Moon phenomenon on its eastern side.
This happens because the Moon has just completed the first quarter of its journey around the Earth. This half-bright moon phenomenon will occur at 18.07 WIB.
(lth/lth)
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