An asteroid the scale of the Statue of Liberty will zip by Earth within the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Labeled 2013 WV44, the 300-foot-long (91-meter-long) asteroid is touring at an astonishing pace of seven.3 miles (11.8 kilometers) per second, so it’s an excellent factor that it’s not stopping off right here.
NASA’s Heart for Close to Earth Object Research has calculated that the flying rock, which it began monitoring 10 years in the past, will go by at a protected distance of about 2 million miles (3.3 million kilometers) at 4 a.m. ET on Wednesday. Which will appear to be an enormous distance, and in some ways it’s, however when you think about it by way of the scale of our photo voltaic system, it feels far more like a really shut encounter.
Asteroids are hurtling by Earth’s neighborhood on a regular basis, and fortunately only a few pose a critical risk. Nevertheless it doesn’t imply that Earth won’t ever face a dangerous scenario sooner or later, particularly as we all know that our planet has already suffered some catastrophic asteroid strikes. That’s why the likes of NASA and its European counterpart, ESA, are spending a lot money and time on monitoring deep area for such threats.
Eager to discover methods of coping with a big asteroid calculated to be heading proper for us, NASA final 12 months examined a system designed to change the trajectory of such an object. The DART mission smashed a spacecraft right into a non-hazardous asteroid removed from Earth, and knowledge confirmed that it succeeded in altering its course, paving the way in which for engineers to work on refining the system to make it as efficient as potential.
“A comparatively small variety of near-Earth objects go shut sufficient to Earth and are massive sufficient in measurement to warrant shut commentary,” NASA says on its web site. “That’s as a result of the gravitational tug of the planets might, over time, trigger an object’s orbital path to evolve into an Earth-crossing orbit. This permits for the potential for a future collision.”
If we’re ever confronted with a cataclysmic asteroid encounter, you possibly can (if there’s time) pop over to this useful web site to study extra concerning the extent of the injury that it’s more likely to trigger.
Tonight, although, you possibly can sleep soundly, safe within the information that 2013 WV44’s flight path gained’t even trigger your curtains to flutter.
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