A newly discovered “potentially dangerous” asteroid roughly the size of the world’s tallest skyscraper is set to pass Earth on Halloween, according to NASA.
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The asteroid, named 2022 RM4, has a diameter between 1,083 and 2,428 feet (330 and 740 metres).
It will travel our planet at about 52,500 mph (84,500 km/h), or roughly 68 times the speed of sound.
At its closest approach on November 1, the asteroid will be 1.43 million miles (2.3 million km) from Earth, about six times the average distance between Earth and the Moon. And by cosmic standards, that’s a very small margin.
NASA defines any space object within 120 million miles (193 million km) of Earth as a “Near-Earth Object” and classifies any large object within 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) of our planet as a “potential hazard”. Once these potential threats are reported, they are closely monitored by astronomers, who study them with radar for any deviations from their expected trajectories.
NASA is tracking the positions and orbits of nearly 28,000 asteroids and identifies them using the Last Earth Collision Alert System (ATLAS) – a group of four telescopes capable of scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours.
Since the launch of the online Atlas system in 2017, more than 700 near-Earth asteroids and 66 comets have been detected. Two of the asteroids discovered by Atlas, 2019 MO and 2018 LA, smashed into Earth, the first exploded off the southern coast of Puerto Rico and the last landed near the borders of Botswana and South Africa. Fortunately, those asteroids were small and did not cause any damage.
The good news is that Earth faces no known danger from a horrific asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years, according to NASA.
But that doesn’t mean astronomers think they should stop looking.
Source: Live Science
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