An asteroid is set to approach our planet next week with NASA’s brand “potentially dangerous”.
The heavenly rock, which has been called Asteroid 2020ND, is one and a half times larger than the London Eye.
NASA scientists warn that the asteroid is flying into Earth’s orbit and will be just 0.034 astronomical units (AU) from our planet.
The asteroid is 170 meters high and is ready to approach Earth on Friday, July 24.
The space agency said: “Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening approaches to Earth.
(Image: Getty Images / iStockphoto)
“Specifically, all asteroids with a minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) of 0.05 au or less are considered PHAs.”
The asteroid could have been “pushed” into an orbit that will carry it to Earth’s space region by the gravity of other planets.
NASA said on its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) website: “NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been pushed by the gravitational pull of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter Earth’s neighborhood.”
“The scientific interest in comets and asteroids is largely due to their condition as relatively unchanged remnants of the process of forming the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.”
His statement added: “The giant outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) formed from an agglomeration of billions of comets and the remnants of this formation process are the comets we see today.
“Similarly, today’s asteroids are the remaining fragments of the initial crush of the inner planets that include Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.”
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Being within 0.034 AU of our planet is close in spatial terms, but it is approximately 3,160,497 miles from Earth in our terms.
It occurs when a new space race between NASA, China and the UAE began with everyone vying to send probes to Mars “to demonstrate that life exists.”
The UAE looks set to get started on its Hope mission, which has a release date of July 16 this week.
China’s Tianwen-1 is slated to go up between July 20-25, and NASA Perseverance is slated to launch somewhere between July 30 and August 15.
The missions start a very important month for the world’s fascination with the Red Planet and its exploration, and one of them could even discover the secrets that prove that there is or has been life on Mars.
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