An asteroid is very unlikely to hit Earth this year

An asteroid doubling the width of the racing car that exploded in the atmosphere over Russia in 2013 is getting closer to our planet in September, and there is a tiny chance it will have an even bigger impact.

But it will almost certainly not be the case. The 2006 asteroid QV89 currently has a 7,000 chance of hitting the Earth on the morning of September 9, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), which ranks space rock as the fourth most worrying object from his top 10 cosmic objects with a -Zero chance to hit us.

Current modeling of the orbit of the asteroid shows that it is more likely that it will pass through the Earth at a distance of more than 6.8 million km in September, but the ESA says that there is about a hundredth of a 1% chance that the model is very far away and that it is hitting our planet instead.

With a diameter of up to 50 meters (164 feet), it could be the impact of meteoroids that we see only every few decades, and the NASA administrator recently noted that we are due for a little more so this century.

In order to better estimate the chances that 2006 QV89 might be a problem for us, ESA redefined the images more than ten years ago, but the new evaluation has not yet changed much the chances of it. ;impact.

Once again, recent history has shown us that sometimes the most dangerous asteroids are the ones we have not yet spotted. For example, the bolide that destroyed thousands of windows in Russia six years ago came from behind the sun's shadow and was not seen by astronomers until and until It has already collided with our atmosphere.