According to the forecast of the Center, two of them spent this Saturday near our planet and in the next few days others will follow.
Two more are expected on Sunday: Asteroids 2021 TJ12 and 2021 TH13Their diameter ranges between 55 and 124 feet (17 and 38 m) and between 20 and 46 feet (6.2 and 14 m), respectively. Although they think that they will travel a “short” distance from Earth, the distance you will pass is the closest You will do it from a distance of at least 395,000 miles (1.6 lunar distance).
NASA defines “NEO” as “comets and asteroids that have been gravitationally thrust upon nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s vicinity.”
“In astronomical terms, they come close to Earth. But from a human perspective, they are millions of miles apart and they can’t get any closer than millions of miles.” dijo a ABC News Paul Chodas, CNEOS Director at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
One of the space objects that will pass close to Earth in the next few days will do exactly that on Monday: it 2021 TG14, which will ‘only’ 143,313 miles (0.6 dinars).
On the other hand, the diameter of the largest activators that will pass close to Earth will be between 557 and 1,246 feet (between 170 and 380 meters), more than four times the width of the Empire State Building.
Chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth are “rare”
CNEOS has detected and tracked more than 27,000 near-Earth objects, according to ABC News. Asteroids vary in size, and although there are very large asteroids, many are small and burn up when they enter Earth’s atmosphere.
According to Paul Chodas, the chances of a massive asteroid colliding with the planet are extremely rare.
“It’s just a fact that there are very few large and medium-sized asteroids that approach Earth at first,” he said. “There are relatively few large asteroids,” he said. “The largest near-Earth asteroid is about 10 kilometers (6 miles) long. But there are only one or two of them.”
Asteroids are detected by observatories, cameras, telescopes and studies of motion in the night sky. When one of them is identified, its measurements and positions are calculated, as well as the orbital path to predict its future motions in the future and to estimate the probability of its impact on Earth.
A huge asteroid could collide with Earth, but NASA already has a plan to avoid it
Asteroids that hit Earth recently
“Over the past 20 years that we’ve been doing this, we’ve had a total of four asteroids, very small asteroids, that have been spotted in space and made their way to Earth, impacting the atmosphere and burning up in it. A bright fireball,” Chodas told ABC News. in each case.”
He added, “In two of the cases, we predicted where the collision would be ahead of time and predicted where to find the meteorites. Expeditions went out and found the meteorites. So our calculations are working fine.”
Of these four examples, perhaps the most notable is one Chelyabinsk Russia , in February 2013.
“This was the biggest impact observed in recent memory, I think for 100 years. That was a 20-meter asteroid that passed through the atmosphere over Russia and disintegrated. What started out as a 20-meter asteroid ended up as a core,” Chodas said. A boulder no more than one meter wide, it fell into a frozen lake and made a beautiful round hole in the ice.”
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