Asteroid 2020ND is a truly monstrous space rock, measuring 170 meters, and it will get close to Earth in a few days. The massive space rock is almost 1.5 times the size of the London Eye, which is 135 meters high. And NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have revealed that the asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth on July 24, when it will be within just 0.034 astronomical units (AU) of our planet.
One AU (149,598,000 km) is the distance between Earth and the Sun, so on Saturday, the asteroid will be 5,086,327 kilometers from our planet, a hair width in astronomical terms.
Space rock also travels at a staggering 13.5 kilometers per second, or 48,000 kilometers per hour.
At 0.034 AU, NASA has described the object as a “potentially dangerous asteroid (PHA)”.
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.
“Specifically, all asteroids with a minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) of 0.05 au or less are considered PHAs.”
Due to its relative proximity, it is also a near-Earth object (NEO), giving the space agency the perfect opportunity to study it.
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.
“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.
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Part of the reason NASA is sending the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft is to gather more information about the space rock that is 1,640 feet (500 m) long.
NASA fears that the asteroid, which has the potential to destroy a country on Earth, may hit our planet in the next 120 years, with the next close flyby in 2135.
The mission will provide vital information on how to deflect asteroids from their collision course with Earth, but NASA reiterates that while there is a small chance that Earth could be affected, “for millions of years, of all planets, it is more Bennu is likely to hit. ” Venus”.