A massive asteroid visits Earth in mid-September

LONDON (Reuters) – An asteroid larger than London's famous Shard Tower is approaching our planet and will be aligned next month, NASA reported on Tuesday.

The 2000 QW7 asteroid is 650 meters long and 290 meters in diameter and will reach its closest point on Earth on September 14th.

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The asteroid is tall compared to the Shard tower 310 meters tall, while the tallest building in the world, the Dubai Burj Khalifa, measures 828 meters.

The asteroid travels at a speed of about 23,174 kilometers at the time (14,400 miles to the hour) and will travel a distance of about 5.3 million kilometers of the Earth, according to the NASA Center for Near-Earth Objects Studies. They look far away, but they are very close to the standards of the vast universe.

Each celestial object located within a radius of 48 million kilometers, or 1.3 astronomical unit, is called a being close to Earth and the 2000 QW7 asteroid orbiting the Sun crosses the Earth almost every 6956 days or 19.04 years old. Our planet will be on September 1, 2000 and its next visit will be October 19, 2038.

NASA reports that the 2000 QW7 is "potentially dangerous", but there is still no information on a risk of collision with the Earth, but the agency's chief, Jim Pridenstein, warned earlier that there was a "deadly" asteroid in the Relatively near future.

"It's not Hollywood, nor cinema, but the protection of the only planet we know today to organize life," he said.

Keeping in mind that asteroids continue to approach the Earth from time to time, NASA already seems to be working on a plan for defense against asteroids, including the DART or Double Asteroid Redirection Test technology, under development.

Source: The Independent

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