- 4440
- ASTEROIDS - a
close flyby? - The asteroid discovered Tuesday (April 9,
2024) made an extremely close, but harmless, pass by planet Earth on April
11. Asteroid 2024 GJ2 is roughly the
size of a car and, since its discovery, astronomers calculated that the space
rock would graze by Earth at a mere 12-thousand-mile distance. That's just three percent the distance
between the Earth and the moon.
-
------------------------- 4440
- ASTEROIDS - a
close flyby?
-
- Asteroid
2024 GJ2 measures between 8.2 and 16 feet. This means it's an asteroid with a
weight-class that would have burned up in Earth's atmosphere, if its orbit
happened to intersect ours more directly.
Astronomers believe the asteroid's closest approach distance to Earth
occurred at on Thursday, April 11, at a distance of 7,641 miles.
-
- The next closest flyby of 2024 GJ2 won't
occur until 2093. When that happens, the asteroid won't pass nearly as
close. GJ2's 2093 approach is
estimated to fly as close as 127,970 miles
to us, 10 times just over half the distance between Earth and the moon.
-
- NASA has cataloged nearly 35,000 near-Earth
asteroids to date, though very few of those pose any threat to the planet. What asteroids pose the greatest risk of
hitting Earth, how probable is an impact, and how much destructive power would
such collisions have?
-
- Around 66 million years ago, Earth was
struck by a city-size asteroid. The impact released the energy equivalent to
the detonation of 72 trillion tons of TNT, carving a 100-mile-wide scar in what
is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.
-
- The most infamous effect of this asteroid,
named the “Chicxulub impactor”, was the death of the nonavian dinosaurs along
with around three-quarters of Earth's species in an event called the
Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.
-
- In an effort to prevent similarly
catastrophic collisions, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS)
operates the Sentry impact-monitoring system, which continuously performs
long-term analyses of possible future orbits of potentially hazardous
asteroids. Here are the five asteroids that pose the greatest risk to Earth.
However, there are likely others lurking behind the sun's glare which we may be
unaware of.
-
- The sun is blinding us to thousands of
potentially lethal asteroids. Can scientists spot them before it's too late?
-
------------------------ Bennu
-
------------------------ Size: 0.30 mile
-
------------------------ Mass: 74 million tons
-
- Discovered in September 1999 and
officially designated "101955 Bennu (1999 RQ36)," the near-Earth
asteroid Bennu currently poses the greatest risk of impacting our planet — but
fortunately, not for some time. NASA scientists calculate that when Bennu makes
a close approach to Earth on Sept. 24, 2182, there is a 0.037% — or 1 in 2,700
— chance that the asteroid will strike our planet.
-
- In preparation for this, scientists are
learning as much as they can about this carbon-rich asteroid, which is believed
to have broken away from a larger asteroid between 2 billion and 700 million
years ago. On September 24, 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returned a
sample of Bennu to Earth, and the space rock will be analyzed by teams of
researchers across the globe.
If Bennu impacted Earth, it
would release the energy equivalent to the detonation of 1.4 billion tons of
TNT, causing regional destruction but lacking the potential to cause global
devastation. If it were to impact a densely populated area, Bennu could cause
millions of deaths.
-
- At the moment, there are no objects on the
Sentry Risk table about level 0. Bennu
and 1950 DA don't have Torino ratings
because their predicted impacts are more than 100 years into the future. As
NASA states, "There is currently no known significant threat of impact for
the next hundred years or more."
-
- Of course, there still could be potentially
hazardous objects out there waiting to be found. Indeed, thousands of potential
"city-killers" and even some "planet-killers" may be hiding
in the sun's glare, which is why CNEOS is ever vigilant in its search for
near-Earth asteroids.
-
April 23, 2023 ASTEROIDS - a
close flyby? 4440
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--------------------- --- Tuesday, April 23, 2024
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