Giant asteroid the size of a skyscraper to safely fly by Earth on Sunday

New News, Jakarta – An asteroid the size of a skyscraper will pass safely near Earth on Sunday (11/6/2023), approximately 1.9 million miles (3.1 million kilometers) from our planet – about eight times the average distance between Earth and the moon, according to NASA.

Reported from Live Science, the asteroid named 1994 XD is estimated to have a diameter of between 1,200 and 2,700 feet (370 to 830 meters), making it about the size of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth. Previous observations have shown that these rocks are binary asteroids, consisting of large asteroids that have small satellites orbiting them.

If you want to witness this giant asteroid approaching Earth, you can watch it live from the Virtual Telescope Project, which will show a flyby of the asteroid on Sunday around 8:50 p.m. EDT.

Even though this space rock will miss Earth, NASA still classifies it as a potentially hazardous asteroid, given its size and proximity to Earth. Any object larger than 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter orbiting within 4.65 million miles (7.48 million km) of Earth, or about 20 times the average distance between Earth and the moon, is considered potentially hazardous, because unexpected changes to the object’s orbit could send it towards a collision with our planet.

Currently, no object of this size is known to be at risk of hitting Earth for at least the next 1,000 years, new studies have found.

However, if a large space rock directly threatens our planet, NASA and other space agencies are working on methods to prevent it. In 2022, NASA completed the Double Asteroid Diversion mission, in which a rocket purposely hits an asteroid to change its orbital speed.

The mission did not destroy the asteroid directly, but proved that a direct rocket strike is capable of changing the space rock’s orbital parameters in a significant way – making missions like this a viable method of planetary defense, NASA said.