The potentially dangerous asteroid, almost 300 meters wide, will not come this close to Earth for almost 200 years.
According to scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on Friday evening, February 2, an asteroid 271 meters wide will come to the closest distance to Earth in more than 100 years. It’s almost like three football stadiums. The next time this space rock, which could wipe a huge metropolis off the face of the Earth if it falls, will come this close will be almost 200 years later. The asteroid’s approach will be available online, Live Science reports.
On Friday, February 2, at 20:00 Kyiv time, the Virtual Telescope project will start a live broadcast, during which you will be able to watch the approach of the 271-meter-wide asteroid 2008 OS7. The space rock should fly past the Earth at a distance of 2 million 850 thousand meters. km. This is 7 times farther than the Moon is from our planet.
According to scientists, the speed of the asteroid approaching the Earth is 66 thousand km/h. This asteroid is not supposed to hit the Earth, but if it did, it would easily destroy a huge metropolis the size of New York, USA. Although asteroid 2008 OS7 is considered potentially dangerous due to its huge size.
Asteroid 2008 OS7 has a very elongated orbit, in which it orbits the Sun. Therefore, every time it approaches the Earth, its distance from our planet changes. For example, when the asteroid was discovered in 2008, it was 30 times farther away than it will be on February 2, or, more precisely, 90 million kilometers separated the Earth and the space rock.
On the evening of February 2, astronomers will observe the passage of the asteroid 2008 OS7 by the Earth for the third time. But calculations based on its movement through the solar system have shown that over the past 124 years it has never come so close to our planet. The next time such a convergence will take place is in 2198.
On the evening of February 2, astronomers will observe the passage of the asteroid 2008 OS7 by the Earth for the third time. But calculations based on its movement through the solar system have shown that over the past 124 years it has never come so close to our planet. The next time such a convergence will take place is in 2198
According to scientists, the asteroid 2008 OS7 is almost 2 times smaller than the famous asteroid Bennu, where NASA’s spacecraft took rock samples and delivered them to Earth. As Focus has already written, only recently, although 4 months have passed since the samples were delivered, scientists were able to get to the rocks and dust brought from space from Bennu.
Also, the asteroid 2008 OS7 is about 70 times smaller than the space rock that fell to Earth in the distant past and created the famous 300 km diameter Vredefort crater located in southern Africa. It is believed that the asteroid was about 10 km in diameter and its size is equivalent to the stone that fell 66 million years ago and destroyed the dinosaurs.
Scientists currently know about 25,000 potentially dangerous asteroids, although calculations show that none of them will collide with the Earth in the next 100 years.
We remind you that on January 27, a relatively small asteroid 25 meters wide flew past the Earth. But the stone and our planet were separated by only 353 thousand kilometers, which is slightly less than the distance to the Moon, as Focus has already written.
And before that, on January 21, a small asteroid with a width of only 1 meter fell to Earth. To be more precise, the asteroid itself exploded in the atmosphere, and only its fragments fell to the planet’s surface in the form of meteorites. As Focus has already written, scientists have discovered three such meteorites and believe that they may be extremely rare space rocks.
