An asteroid skimmed less than 3,000 kilometers past Earth last weekend. According to the measurements, a space rock has never come so close. Most Remarkable: It wasn’t until six hours after it passed that asteroid 2020 QG was discovered.
That in itself is not a disaster. The space rock was only about the size of a car and would have burned up in the atmosphere. We probably wouldn’t notice it, but it’s alarming that we didn’t see it coming. Space agencies have all kinds of detection programs, which have to register in good time what is shooting past the earth. Ultimately, it was a NASA-funded program that spotted the asteroid six hours later.
Never before has an asteroid come so close without impacting. Nasa only knows a fraction of this kind of space material that comes along, called NEOs (near-earth objects) in English. That can be dangerous if one of them accidentally gets big enough and hits Earth.
Bron(nen): Business Insider –
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