An asteroid roughly four times the size of the Empire State Building is hurtling towards earth and is expected to safely pass by at a speed of 76 000km/h.
Unlike in the movie ‘Don’t look up’, the earth is not in this asteroid’s path, and it is set to zoom past tomorrow (Friday, 27 May).
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This is according to Nasa’s Centre for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
The asteroid, named 7335 (1989 JA), will soundly miss our planet by about 4 million kilometres — or nearly 10 times the average distance between earth and the moon.
Given the asteroid’s size – roughly 1.8km in diameter – and its relatively close proximity to earth, Nasa has declared it ‘potentially hazardous’, meaning it could do ‘enormous damage’ to our planet should its orbit change.
According to Nasa, this is the largest asteroid that will make a close approach to earth this year.
Hurtling through space at 20 times the speed of a bullet, the rock is not expected to make another close flyby until June 2055, when it will be even further away from earth.
This asteroid is one of 29 000 near-earth objects (NEO) tracked by Nasa each year, the majority being extremely small.
NEOs refer to any astronomical object that passes within 48 million kilometres of earth’s orbit.
As reported by Live Science, 7335 (1989 JA) fits into the Apollo class, which refers to asteroids that orbit the sun while periodically crossing earth’s orbit.
Astronomers know of about 15 000 such asteroids.
NEOs like this one are monitored closely by Nasa and they recently launched a mission to test if potentially hazardous asteroids could one day be deflected from a collision course with earth.
In November, Nasa launched a spacecraft called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart), which will collide head-on into the 160m-wide Dimorphos asteroid later this year.
The collision will reportedly not destroy the asteroid, but it may slightly change the rock’s orbital path.
Interested in following the movement of the Asteroid? Follow this link: https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/asteroids/ and type 7335 into the search box.
Sources:
Live Science
SWAICSA/Facebook
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