On September 8, 2020 a planet called PT4 will be shot by Earth and the Moon, in what NASA describes as a “close to Earth” approach. An asteroid is a 36-meter long space rock, almost twice as large as an 18-wheeler truck.
NASA says the asteroid is traveling at 12.6 kilometers per second or 45,360 kilometers per hour.
At that speed, it could travel from the UK to New York more than eight times an hour.
The space rock will travel 4.9 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 1,883,153 kilometers.
Nevertheless, NASA has described it as a near-Earth object (NO), meaning it has the perfect opportunity to study the solar system.
While the chances of hitting a large planet on Earth are slim – NASA believes there is a chance of 30,000,000 each year or a space rock that could cause regional damage – the catastrophic probability is not impossible.
That’s why there are now plans in the pipeline that could help Earth with asteroids.
NASA is currently studying the asteroid Bennu, where its OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft landed last year.
NASA is sending the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft there to collect more information about a 500-meter-long space rock.
NASA fears that the asteroid, which has the potential to destroy any country on Earth, could hit our planet in the next 120 years, with a near-flyby in 2135.
The OSIRIS-Rex has recently completed a major milestone in its quest to collect samples from the asteroid Bennu, after approaching a celestial rock.
By collecting samples, NASA hopes to unravel the mysteries of the solar system, as Bennu is the remnant of the formation of our galactic neighborhood about 6.6 billion years ago.
