TANTRUM – Asteroid dangerous the size of a blue whale will pass Earth on Friday (12/8). The asteroid, named 2015FF, is estimated to have a diameter of between 42 and 92 feet or about the body length of an adult blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus).
The asteroid will glide past Earth at a speed of 20,512mph or about 33,012km/h.
At its closest approach, the asteroid traveling at about 27 times the speed of sound will be within about 2.67 million miles of Earth. Slightly more than eight feet the average distance between Earth and Moon.
NASA marks any celestial object within 120 million miles of Earth as a Near Earth Object (NEO) and fast-moving objects within 4.65 million miles are categorized as potentially dangerous, as quoted from Science Alert.
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Once objects are tagged, astronomers monitor them closely, looking for deviations from their predicted trajectory such as unexpected reflections from other asteroids, which could put them on the path of an Earth-shattering collision.
NASA knows the locations and orbits of some 28,000 asteroids it maps with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), an array of four telescopes capable of carrying out a complete scan of the entire night sky once every 24 hours, as quoted from Live Science.
Since ATLAS went online in 2017, it has detected more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets.
Two asteroids detected by ATLAS are 2019 MO and 2018 LA. 2019 MO exploded off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and 2018 LA landed near the border of Botswana and South Africa. Luckily, the asteroid was small and didn’t cause any damage.
NASA has estimated the trajectories of all NEO objects during the end of the century. The good news is that Earth faces no danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years.
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But that doesn’t mean space observers think they should stop searching. While most near-Earth objects have not ended civilization, there have still been many devastating asteroid impacts in recent history.
Source: iNews
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