Last week, a sixty-meter asteroid flew relatively close to our planet without anyone noticing. So, to be precise, astronomers first observed it two days later – on Saturday, July 15. About the event reports TechSpot magazine.
The object, labeled as 2023 NT1, first noted by astronomers from the Atlas Observatory in South Africa. From the findings so far, it follows that it approached the Earth at a distance of up to 97 thousand kilometers. That’s roughly a quarter of the distance the moon orbits our planet.
He could not be seen because of the Sun
Amateur astronomer Tony Dunn in a post on the social network Twitter stated that on July 13 an asteroid with a diameter of up to sixty meters passed the Earth. According to his information, if it hit land, it would have caused a larger impact crater than the smaller meteor that left Arizona 50,000 years ago Barringer Crater about 1200 meters in diameter.
This is how it would turn out if asteroid 2023 NT1 hit the center of Brno
A quick look at Asteroid Launcher website shows that if 2023 NT1 were to fall at an angle of 45° to the center of Brno, then due to its size and speed of 11.28 km/s caused an explosion equivalent to four megatons of trinitrotoluene. The resulting shock wave would cause the collapse of buildings in a radius of almost six kilometers.
It should be noted that we usually know about most potentially dangerous space objects long before they come close to our planet. For example, in June, the asteroid 1994 XD, which has a diameter of 370 to 830 meters, approached the Earth at a distance of 1.96 million kilometers. It was discovered by the Spacewatch group at the Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona in 1994.
The reason we didn’t catch asteroid 2023 NT1 in time is relatively simple: for he was approaching in the direction of the Sun and was thus hiding in its glow. For the same reason, in 2013, no one noticed a twenty-meter asteroid that exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, with the resulting shock wave injuring 1,500 people and damaging a number of buildings.
Asteroids will be monitored by NEOMIR
The European Space Agency (ESA) estimates that there may be up to a million near-Earth asteroids between 30 and 100 meters in size. According to the space agency, 98.9% of them are still undiscovered. This, she says, shows an urgent need to improve humanity’s ability to detect such asteroids.
In an effort to prevent similar situations in the future, the European Space Agency planned a project called NEOMIR. Within it, it will be between the Earth and the Sun around the first Lagrange point (L1) to orbit a probe with instruments enabling the observation of asteroids, which can approach the Earth from the direction away from the Sun. Unfortunately, its launch is not planned until 2030.
“By observing in the infrared part of the light spectrum, NEOMIR will detect the heat emitted by the asteroids themselves, which will not be drowned out by sunlight. This radiated heat is absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, but from space NEOMIR will be able to see further than is currently possible when observing from Earth.” reported by the ESA.
2023-07-20 07:45:12
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