“Huge asteroid 2023 JD2, potentially hazardous, to zip past Earth tomorrow at 29,000mph, NASA reveals”

The idea of ​​an asteroid the size of Big Ben over London may seem beyond the plot of the latest science fiction film.

But it will become a reality tomorrow, when a space rock will fall 3.4 million miles from Earth.

While this may seem far away, NASA classifies it as a “near-Earth” approach, and even says that this asteroid is “potentially hazardous”.

The asteroid is named “2023 JD2”, and is estimated to be 360 ​​feet (110 meters) in diameter.

In short, it is larger than Big Ben in London and the Statue of Liberty in New York, which measure 315 feet (96 meters) and 305 feet (93 meters) respectively.

The asteroid will approach its closest point to Earth tomorrow at 19:52 GMT.

At that point, it was about 0.03 meters (3.4 million miles) from us, and traveling at 29,000 miles per hour, according to NASA.

NASA explains that “near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that bring them within 120 million miles (195 million kilometers) of the sun, which means they can orbit around Earth’s orbit.”

Most NEOs are asteroids that range in size from about 10 feet (a few meters) to nearly 25 miles (40 kilometers) across.

Although the probability of this asteroid hitting Earth is very low, NASA has not ruled out the risk of an asteroid hitting Earth in the near future.

NASA discovers about 30 new near-Earth objects (NEOs) every week, and at the start of 2019 they discovered a total of more than 19,000 objects.

However, the space agency warned that the NEO catalog is incomplete, meaning unexpected impacts could occur “at any time.”

NASA explains: “Experts estimate that an impact from an object the size of the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 – 55 feet (17 meters) – occurs once or twice a century.

Larger body impacts are expected to be less frequent (on a scale of centuries to thousands of years).

“However, since the NEO catalog is currently incomplete, unexpected impacts such as the Chelyabinsk event can occur at any time.”

To help prepare for such an impact, NASA recently launched its first “planetary defense” mission to deflect an asteroid 6.8 million miles from Earth.

A small spacecraft managed to deflect a space rock by crashing into it as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.

The craft’s target is a moon called Dimorphos orbiting its parent asteroid, Didymos.

On September 26, DART soared 15,000 mph (24,000 km/h) towards Dimorphos to push it out of orbit.

And on March 1, 2023, NASA confirmed that the mission was a resounding success.

The fridge-sized satellite managed to shave 33 minutes from the 520-foot-wide asteroid’s orbit — nearly five times more than expected, according to Christina Thomas and colleagues at Northern Arizona University.

“To serve as a proof-of-concept kinetic collision technology for planetary defense, DART needs to demonstrate that asteroids can be targeted during high-speed encounters and that the target’s orbit can be changed,” they concluded.

DART has successfully done both.

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