A huge rocky body, classified as “potentially dangerous”will pass near the land This Friday, scientists from the NASA.
They explained that it is the asteroid 2020ND, which is 170 meters high and travels 13.5 kilometers per second (48,000 kilometers per hour) and is one and a half times larger than the London Eye.
The most worrying thing is that it will approach only 0.034 astronomical units (UA), reason why it was classified as “potentially dangerous”, since it contemplates certain risk of impact against our planet.
“Currently, potentially dangerous asteroids are defined by parameters that measure how likely they are to make threatening approaches to the land“, explained the space agency, and added: “Specifically, everyone with a minimum orbit intersection distance of 0.05 AU or less is considered to fall into that classification.”.
Experts considered that the presence of this asteroid in the Solar System could be due to being “pushed” by gravity of other planets. In that sense, NASA also classified 2020ND within the so-called “Objects close to Earth”, which he describes as “comets and asteroids that were relocated by the gravitational pull of planets close to orbits that allow them to enter Earth’s neighborhood”.
According to the US agency, they are heavenly bodies of great scientific interest, since they are usually “relatively unchanged remnants” of the process of formation of the Solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
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