A "potentially dangerous" asteroid almost a mile wide with its own little moon at the corner of the Earth this weekend



[ad_1]

A big asteroid with its own little moon is about to overtake the Earth this weekend.

The so-called binary asteroid, known as 1999 KW4, will make its closest approach at 19:05. And May 25, when it will be about 3.2 million miles from Earth – a safe but relatively derisory distance in space terms, reported NBC News. For the context, this figure is about 13.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

According to NASA's Center for Near-Earth Objects, the 1999 KW4 will exceed Earth at a speed of about 48,000 km / h. The main object, in the form of a top with a pronounced ridge around its equator, should measure about 1.80 kilometers in diameter. The small moon, which orbits at a distance of 2.5 km every 16 hours, would be about a third of that size, reported EarthSky.

1999 KW4 was first discovered in 1999 by the Asteroid Research Program in nearby Lincoln, New Mexico. Since then, it has been closely followed and studied by astronomers. In fact, during its latest approach, scientists from various observatories will closely follow the subject as part of an international effort to protect the Earth from future catastrophic asteroid strikes.

"It's probably one of the closest binary flybys in recent history," NBC News told Vishnu Reddy, a scientist in planetary science at the University of New York. Arizona to Tucson. "That's what makes it a very interesting target."

1999 KW4 was classified as a Near Earth object (NEO), a term that refers to any asteroid or comet whose orbit takes it at a distance of 121 million kilometers from the sun and about 30 million kilometers from the Earth.

It has also been defined as a "potentially dangerous object", that is, any NEO that has a (typically) low chance of colliding with the Earth – that is, that is, the minimum expected approach distance is less than 4.6 million miles – and is greater than 460 feet in diameter.

According to EarthSky, 1999 KW4 is the largest space rock on our planet until June 2027, when the asteroid 4953 (1990 MU), whose diameter is estimated to be at least 2, 5 miles, will pass beyond the Earth.

Researchers currently have more than 18,000 Named Executive Officers, more than 1,800 of whom are considered potentially dangerous. Although there are a handful of potentially dangerous objects that are unlikely to collide with the Earth in tens or even hundreds of years, the probabilities will probably drop as the monitoring stations are making more observations, which allows for more accurate predictions of their trajectories.

asteroid, 1999 KW4 Different views of the 1999 KW4 asteroid and its moon. NASA

[ad_2]

Source link