As reported by the Daily Star Tuesday (18/1/2022), following NASA scientists explaining space objects such as asteroids hurtling towards our planet at night can slip undetected by a network of computerized telescopes.
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In 2019, an asteroid measuring 100 meters nearly hit Earth at a distance of 69,201 kilometers, shocking the world astronomy community.
The asteroid known as 2019 OK is the latest incident on record since 1908. After an alien object was detected just 24 hours earlier, the US Congress ordered NASA to identify 90 percent of asteroids over 140 meters in size that could destroy a city if it fell to Earth.
As part of that order, NASA launched a heavy spacecraft last year to crash into a group of comets and shift their trajectory away from Earth, reports The Telegragph newspaper.
Professor Richard Wainscoat, who leads a team of researchers on the asteroid threat at the University of Hawaii, said people should not panic about the danger.
“We wouldn’t hug the body if we knew something was going to hit the earth. It’s not like that,” he said.
However, when the asteroid landed on earth from the eastern sky at 2 a.m., the way the earth rotated and orbited caused the space rock to appear motionless.
A study about it published in the journal Icarus said that 50 percent of foreign objects that approach Earth from the east will experience a stationary phase, making them difficult to detect.
according to Wainscoat, about 40 percent of the large asteroids headed for Earth have been cataloged.
“When we can catalog 90 percent of that number, the number of asteroids that could slip unnoticed will be very small,” he said.
(wbs)
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