Where are NASA to save us? An asteroid almost hit the ground and no one noticed anything!

Where are NASA to save us? An asteroid almost hit the ground and no one noticed anything!

Alan Duffy's phone has not stopped ringing. All managers want to be certain of what is going on around them. How does an asteroid pbad on the Earth without being noticed?

Back from scratch:

"Expectations had already predicted that two asteroids would pbad near Earth this week, this asteroid was not what we were looking for, it seems to have come out of nowhere," said Duffy, who works for the Royal Australian Foundation. , at the Washington Post.

Description of the asteroid:

According to NASA data, the rock asteroid was wide, 57 to 130 meters wide and traveling at a speed of 73,000 kilometers from the Earth, less than one-fifth of the distance from the moon. , that Duffy will soon not be comfortable.

Astronomers from Brazil, the United States and Great Britain only discovered the asteroid at the beginning of the week. Each team gave information on its size and course a few hours before touching the ground.

Michael Brown, a Melbourne astronomer and physics professor, said: "Nobody knew what was going on until it really got away." It's probably one of the most big asteroids that has been around for years. "

How did it happen?

Scientists say that the 2019 OK asteroid is not due to several reasons.

First .. Size:

It's a big chunk of rock, but it does not get close to the scale of danger like the one that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs: a lot of these asteroids, d & # 39; a width of more than one kilometer or more, have already been identified by NASA and its partners.

Second: reflection of the sun:

Duffy said the scientists depended on the reflected sun and that at best, the path of the asteroid was not visible.

Third: the orbit of asteroids:

Brown describes it as "eccentric", an oval moving between the outside of Mars and the orbit of Venus, which means that the time spent near the Earth where it can be detected is not not long.

Fourth speed factor:

Its speed made it difficult to detect because it was traveling 24 kilometers per second, while the speed of ordinary asteroids was 4 to 19 kilometers per second.

"The discovery of this asteroid at the last minute is a sign of lack of knowledge of space and a reminder of the real threat of asteroids," Duffy said. "We should be worried that it's not Hollywood, it's a clear and present danger."

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He pointed out that astronomers have a title for this type of space rock, "Deadly Asteroids", if touching the ground causes destructive damage, because a nuclear weapon is too big, more than 10 megatons of TNT.

It was the last space rock to hit the Earth as "the 2019 asteroid OK" more than a century ago, and this asteroid, called the "Tongoska event", has caused the explosion of 2,000 square kilometers of land in Siberia.