Saturday, March 25, 2023 | 11:03 WIB
Winda Destiana Putri / WDP
An asteroid the size of Big Ben’s clock tower is rumored to pass about halfway between Earth and the Moon this Saturday.
Jakarta, Beritasatu.com – An asteroid the size of the Big Ben clock tower will reportedly pass about halfway between Earth and the Moon on Saturday (25/3/2023) at a speed of around 17,000 miles per hour.
According to the page Metro.co.uk, The asteroid, named DZ2 2023, was detected on February 27 by astronomers at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in La Palma in the Canary Islands.
Passing at a distance of about 100,000 miles above the planet and about 95 meters long, DZ2 2023 poses no risk to life on Earth, but will offer amateur astronomers a chance to catch a glimpse of this once-in-a-decade phenomenon.
On the Twitter account Asteroid Watch, NASA wrote: ‘While close approaches are a common occurrence, one after another asteroids this large (140-310 feet) occur only once per decade, providing a unique opportunity for science.’
Astronomers are using this unique approach to learn as much as they can about 2023 DZ2 in a short period of time which is good practice for future #PlanetaryDefense should a potential threat from an asteroid be discovered.
Last September, NASA successfully crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in an attempt to change its trajectory as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. The resulting impact is to reduce the time needed for Dimorphos to orbit around its parent asteroid Didymos by 32 minutes.
The latest news comes as NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center chief scientist James Garvin warned that Earth may be at greater risk of experiencing a high-level asteroid impact than previously thought.
Using new high-resolution satellite imagery, his team found four impact impact craters created in the past million years, all linked to strikes thought to be ten times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb in history. Previously it was thought that such attacks only occurred every 600,000 to 700,000 years.
However, with DZ2 2023 posing no threat to humans except for the possibility of stargazing at night, asteroids are one thing to enjoy.
This will be the latest spring night spectacle stargazers will remember after February’s display of dazzling green comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) that passed around Valentine’s Day.
# Asteroid# Big Ben tower# Asteroids Passing Earth
