Liputan6.com, Jakarta – A asteroid 1 mile or 1.6 kilometers wide passed Earth on Friday 27 May at a distance of about 10 times between Earth and the moon.
The asteroid, known as asteroid 7335 (1989 JA), is roughly four times the size of the Empire State Building and is the largest our planet will ever pass by in 2022. The event can be viewed live online via the Virtual Telescope Project, the result of a new collaboration that includes telescopes in Chile, Australia and Rome, as quoted from page Live ScienceMonday (30/5/2022).
“These two live sightings covering JA 1989 were made possible thanks to a new collaboration between the Virtual Telescope Project and the Live Telescope,” founder Gianluca Masi told Space.com.
“They have several telescopes around the planet, under an amazing sky.”
At its closest distance, the asteroid is 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers) away and poses no threat to our planet, despite its massive size at 1.1 miles (1.8 km) wide. That’s bright enough to be seen in a medium-sized telescope.
Increasing tracking of these relatively small space rocks means we’re getting better at capturing potential impacts before they happen, which is why there seems to be so much space rock we’re passing through lately.
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video-gallery--item__video-caption_read-video-article">DART is a NASA mission to launch a spacecraft that is scripted to crash into an asteroid so as not to hit Earth. This SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be on its way to hitting an asteroid more than 6 million miles away.
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