2023-12-10 20:00:00
El Wide Field Survey Telescope (West, for its acronym in English), the powerful Chinese wide field survey telescope which began operating at the beginning of September of this year in the Chinese province of Qinghai has just discovered the presence of two near-Earth asteroidsaccording to reports from the Chinese news agency Xinhua.
While one of the discovered celestial bodies was named 2023 WB2 and does not present any risk to the Earth, on the contrary, 2023 WXI was classified by Chinese scientists as “potentially dangerous””. not only for its approximately 170 meters in diameterbut, fundamentally, for presenting a minimum orbital intersection distance with the Earth of just about 6.22 million kilometers.
However, according to Chinese astronomers, 2023 WX1 has very little chance of hitting the Earth, Therefore, for the moment, humanity should not worry about its presence in space or its proximity to our planet.
“Although the celestial body will enter the so-called safe space, established at 7.5 million kilometers, At the moment, the gigantic asteroid has no collision pathso, although at present there may be a risk, at the moment we are not in danger, “At least in the next 100 years.”they pointed out from the NASA Planetary Defense Office.
“Currently there around 750,000 visible asteroids orbiting near the Solar System of which 2,304 are potentially dangerous. However, “Not one of them has a probability of impact, at least for the moment,” concluded the American scientists.
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