A NASA laboratory has discovered a giant asteroid heading towards Earth, known as the City Killer, and today, Tuesday, it will reach the closest point to our planet, about 1.77 million miles away.
According to NASA, the asteroid 2008 OS7 is expected to move at a speed of about 41,000 miles per hour, and its width is about 890 feet, or approximately the size of a football field.
Experts sometimes call these asteroids “city killers,” because they are capable of destroying an entire city if they collide with an inhabited part of the Earth, but this asteroid will be so small and distant that it cannot be seen without a telescope, according to the article published in the scientific journal “sciencealert.”
Gianluca Masi, an astrophysicist and scientific director of the virtual telescope project, said that it will be about 10,000 times weaker than the faintest stars that can be seen with the naked eye. Massey and his colleagues will record the event live starting at 1 p.m. EST today.
The live broadcast will track the asteroid “2008 OS7” as it flies near Earth, and observers will be able to distinguish it as a small dot moving through other small fixed points, also known as stars, and Massey added that the live broadcast lasts about 45 minutes.
Asteroid 2008 OS7 orbits the Sun every 962 days, and after passing Earth, it will continue along its elliptical path through our solar system. (Sputnik)
