A potentially dangerous 1.8 kilometers wide asteroid will approach Earth as it passes through its orbit around the Sun. A close encounter with Earth is scheduled for later this month when the asteroid passes at an astonishing speed of 47,196 kilometers per hour.
While the asteroid will pass by Earth without any damage, NASA still classifies the UFO as potentially dangerous. The object, called 1989 JA, was discovered in 1989 at the Palomar Observatory, and can be seen with binoculars as it approaches the planet’s orbit.
The asteroid will approach the planet at about 4024,182 kilometers, which is very close to flying over an object. The last time it came close to Earth was in 1996 when an asteroid swept the planet from a distance of more than four million kilometers.
It is marked as the Apollo asteroid in its one-year orbit around the sun after Earth’s transit, and its next encounter with Earth will be after its May 29 flight in September 2029. It will make two additional flights in 2055 and 2062.
View of the orbit of asteroid JA1989 in white approaching Earth (blue). (Photo: JPL)
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Asteroids are rock fragments left over from the formation of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago. According to NASA’s Joint Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which tracks the movement of asteroids, an asteroid is classified as a near-Earth object when the distance from our planet is less than 1.3 times the distance from Earth to the Sun (the distance between Earth and the Sun is about 93 million miles).
The last major asteroid to approach Earth was 138971 (2001 CB21), it was 1.3 kilometers wide and approached Earth 49,11,298 kilometers on March 4. The sun completes its orbit in less than 400 days.
In April this year, a meteor exploded in the skies of the US state of Mississippi, while people in Arkansas, Louisiana reported seeing a speckled fireball. The object, which scientists have dubbed a polyide, is moving southwest at a speed of 55,000 miles per hour (88,500 kilometers per hour), breaking into pieces as it descends deeper into Earth’s atmosphere.
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