‘Potentially dangerous’ space rock will cross Earth on Saturday

NASA has revealed that an asteroid previously described as “dangerous” will pass near Earth at the end of this week, as the agency will closely monitor this space rock as it passes.

The asteroid is known as 2020 ST1, it is a “monstrous” rock that currently traverses the solar system, and the asteroid’s length reaches 350 meters, making it three times longer than a terrain of soccer.

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According to observations from NASA, the giant space rock is moving at 8.1 kilometers per second, or more than 29,000 kilometers per hour.

Asteroid ST1 2020 will reach its closest point to Earth on Saturday, November 14.

And NASA surveillance services show the asteroid will travel more than 19 times the distance between Earth and the Moon – more than seven million kilometers. However, NASA believes the asteroid could be “dangerous”.

The term “potentially dangerous objects” refers to near-Earth asteroids or comets that have orbits approaching Earth at very close distances, and at the same time, they are large enough to collide and cause collisions. catastrophic effects over large geographic areas.

“Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on criteria that measure the asteroid’s ability to approach Earth. Specifically, all asteroids are considered to have a minimum orbital intersection distance ( MOID) of 0.05 units or less, ”NASA said.

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The asteroid is also a “near-Earth object” (NEO), which allows NASA to study the history of the solar system.

“Near-Earth objects are comets and asteroids pushed by gravity from nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter Earth’s vicinity,” NASA said on its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) website. Much of the scientific interest in comets and asteroids is due to their status as relatively unchanged remnants of the process. The formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. “

The giant exoplanets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) formed from billions of comets and the remnants of parts of this forming process are the comets we see today.

Likewise, today’s asteroids are the leftover pieces of the original cluster of inner planets that include Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

Source: Express

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