According to NASA, a recently discovered “potentially dangerous” asteroid, roughly the size of the tallest skyscraper in the world, will pass to Earth on Halloween.
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The asteroid, named 2022 RM4, is between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 meters) in diameter.
It will travel on our planet at approximately 52,500 mph (84,500 km / h), which is approximately 68 times the speed of sound.
At its closest approach on November 1, the asteroid will be 1.43 million miles (2.3 million km) from Earth, about six times the average distance between Earth and the Moon. And by cosmic standards, this is a very small margin.
NASA defines any space object within 120 million miles (193 million km) of Earth as a “near-Earth object” and classifies any large object within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) of the Earth. our planet as a “potential danger”. Once these potential threats are reported, they are closely monitored by astronomers, who study them with radar for any deviations from their predicted trajectories.
NASA is tracking the positions and orbits of nearly 28,000 asteroids and identifies them using the Last Earth Collision Alert System (ATLAS), a group of four telescopes capable of scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours.
Since the launch of the Atlas system online in 2017, more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets have been detected. Two of the asteroids discovered by Atlas, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, crashed to Earth, the first exploded off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the last landed near the borders of Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, those asteroids were small and didn’t cause any damage.
The good news is that Earth faces no known dangers from a horrific asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years, according to NASA.
But that doesn’t mean astronomers think they should stop looking.
Source: Science Live
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