An asteroid will pass close to Earth on November 2, one day before the US presidential elections. This was reported by the Center for the Study of Near-Earth Objects. The body will be at a minimum distance of 348,000 kilometers of the planet, informs CNN.
The celestial body, called 2018VP1, was identified in 2018 at the Palomar Observatory in California. It has a diameter of 0.002 kilometers. According to experts, the chances of it entering the atmosphere or colliding with the Earth are low: 0.41%, or one in 240.
The asteroid will pass at a speed greater than 34,000 kilometers per hour. The NASA estimates that the body weighs almost 16 tons. The British medium The Sun dice that although an unlikely fall of 2018VO1 on Earth can cause a lot of damage, the asteroid is 7,500 times smaller than the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs.
Many collisions
According to a published study by the magazine Science in 2019, in the last 290 million years, the Earth and the Moon they have experienced more than twice as many collisions with asteroids than there were in the previous 700 million years.
They usually hit our planet every million or few million years. Because of this, NASA’s list shows no major outstanding threats. The greatest known risk is an asteroid of 4,200 feet wide with a 99.988% probability that it does not reach the Earth when it flies very close to her 861 years from now.
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