Jakarta – NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered the ‘City Killer’ asteroid passing Earth. According to NASA, this asteroid will be at its closest position, namely 1.77 million miles or around 2.848 million km, on February 6 2024.
Quoting from detikInet, for reference, the distance from Earth to the Moon is 384,400 km. That means, the asteroid is about 7.4 times farther than the distance from Earth to the Moon.
Launching Science Alert, Wednesday (7/2/2024) the asteroid in question is Asteroid 2008 OS7. He has a speed of around 41,000 mph or the equivalent of 65,983 km/hour. Its length reaches 890 feet or 271 meters. Experts sometimes call asteroids of this size ‘city killers’, because these asteroids are capable of destroying entire cities if they collide with Earth.
Furthermore, this asteroid would be too small and far away to be seen without a telescope. It will be 10,000 times fainter than the faintest star visible to the naked eye. This was revealed by Gianluca Masi, an astrophysicist and scientific director of the Virtual Telescope Project.
But if you are curious and want to see it, Masi and his colleagues recorded the event live starting at 1 pm local time. You can watch the live broadcast on YouTube, or on the YouTube video that has been uploaded to The Virtual Telescope Project channel.
Asteroid 2008 OS7 orbits the Sun every 962 days. After passing Earth, it will continue its oval-shaped journey through our Solar System.
Its orbit is oval, meaning that every time the asteroid approaches Earth, its distance from our planet varies greatly. The Space Reference website estimates that the next closest distance will take place in July 2037, about 9.7 million miles (15.61 million km) from Earth.
This article was published on detikInet with the title ‘City Killer’ Asteroid Passes By Earth, Here’s How To See It.
(ask/sud)
2024-02-10 23:00:40
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