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The biggest asteroid to visit Earth this year is zoomed in by our planet today (March 21) and it’s a true speed demon.
Asteroid 2001 FO32 travels through space at an unusually fast speed for a space rock, at around 77,000 mph (124.0000 km / h), and will pass through Earth at a safe distance of 1.25 million miles ( 2 million kilometers), according to NASA. It won’t return so close to Earth until 2052.
The 2001 asteroid FO32 is up to 680 meters wide and poses no risk of impact on Earth, but its speed is special, the agency said.
“The reason for the asteroid’s unusually fast close approach is its sharply tilted and elongated (or eccentric) orbit around the sun, an orbit tilted 39 degrees from the Earth’s orbital plane,” wrote officials at NASA in a statement. “This orbit brings the asteroid closer to the sun than Mercury and twice as far from the sun as Mars.”
Astrophysicist Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project in Ceccano, Italy, spotted asteroid 2001 FO32 with a telescope in the days leading up to today’s flyby. His video and footage shows the asteroid as a shining moving object in the sky.
Video: Watch asteroid 2001 FO32 move through the night sky
Like a boulder rolling up a hill, asteroid 2001 FO32 picks up speed as it falls inward toward the sun, then slows as it heads toward Mars. The asteroid takes more than two years (810 days to be exact) to complete an orbit and will not pose a risk of impact on Earth for centuries, despite the 2001 FO32 classification as a “potentially dangerous asteroid,” said The NASA.
“We know very precisely the orbital path of the 2001 FO32 around the sun, because it was discovered 20 years ago and has been tracked ever since,” said Paul Chodas, director of the supervised Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). by NASA Jet. Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. “There is no chance that the asteroid will approach Earth within 1.25 million kilometers.”
NASA and astronomers around the world regularly research and track asteroids that may pose a risk of impact on Earth. Asteroid 2001 F032 was first spotted in 2001 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program in Socorro, New Mexico. Observations from NASA’s NEOWISE Space Telescope suggest that the asteroid is between 1,300 and 2,230 feet (440 to 680 m) wide.
“Even though it’s at the smaller end of the scale, 2001 FO32 will still be the biggest asteroid to pass this close to our planet in 2021,” NASA officials wrote. “The last close approach to a particularly large asteroid was from 1998 OR2 on April 29, 2020. While 2001 FO32 is a little smaller than 1998 OR2, it will be three times closer to Earth.”
At its closest point to Earth today, asteroid 2001 FO32 will be approximately 5.25 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. Nonetheless, astronomers will closely monitor the asteroid with telescopes to learn more about its size, brightness, and composition.
“We are trying to do geology with a telescope,” Vishnu Reddy, associate professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona at Tucson, said in the statement.
Astronomers have used NASA’s infrared telescope installation atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii in recent days to determine its chemical makeup. They can also use NASA’s deep space array of radio antennas to bounce signals from asteroid 2001 FO32 to measure its orbit, speed of rotation, and even to determine surface features like craters.
Related: Huge asteroid Apophis revealed in photos
“Observations dating back 20 years have revealed that about 15% of near-Earth asteroids comparable in size to 2001 FO32 have a small moon,” Lance Benner, senior scientist at JPL, said in the statement. “Currently, little is known about this object, so the very close encounter offers an exceptional opportunity to learn a lot about this asteroid.”
The asteroid can also be visible to amateur astronomers in the Southern Hemisphere as it passes through Earth, but it can be difficult to track.
“The asteroid will be the brightest as it moves across the southern sky,” Chodas said. “Amateur astronomers in the southern hemisphere and at lower northern latitudes should be able to see this asteroid using medium-sized telescopes with apertures of at least 8 inches in the nights leading up to the closest approach. , but they’ll probably need star maps to find it. “
Asteroid 2001 FO32 is actually one of two asteroids passing through Earth today, according to NASA’s Asteroid Watch website which lists these overflights. The second asteroid, called 2021 FH1, is about 97 feet (30 m) wide and will pass Earth at a distance of 973,000 miles (1.5 million km). It was first detected by astronomers on Friday March 19.
Email Tariq Malik at [email protected] or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us on @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
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