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An asteroid the size of a school bus is poised to skim Earth’s atmosphere Thursday night.
While it is still some 22,000 kilometers away, it is closer than broadcast television and orbiting weather satellites.
“It’s only about 7 percent of the distance to the moon [away]”Said Duncan Steel, researcher and rocket scientist. “On the astronomical scale of things … this is very, very close.”
“We have only seen a few … [come] so close “.
NASA / JPL-Caltech via AP
The asteroid named 2020 SW is about 22,000 km from Earth.
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The 5-10 meter wide near-Earth asteroid (NEA), named 2020 SW, will pass over New Zealand around 11.18pm Thursday night at a speed of 8 km per second.
Only those with the proper gear will be able to see it, weather permitting. It will not be visible to the naked eye.
The object was only discovered about six days ago by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, USA, which is relatively normal for objects of this size.
“For small objects like this, they just can’t be detected until they’re relatively close to the ground,” Steel said.
Many of those that appear next to the sun are completely lost.
Pot
The asteroid is moving at about 8 km per second.
While an object the size of a bus may not appear very large in the context of space, Steel reiterated that it is made of solid rock.
“If it were on a collision course with the earth, it would release a large amount of energy.”
Steel, who is interested in the mathematical side of space motions rather than observation, said this asteroid will definitely not reach Earth, even if it collides with an orbiting satellite.
“We know this will be lost. Obviously, [it’s] it’s possible that it could hit a satellite, which would annihilate the satellite, but not enough to deflect the asteroid’s path.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
This illustration shows a near-Earth asteroid, such as asteroid 2020 SW, traveling through space.
However, the next asteroid that gets this close could hit Earth and cause large-scale destruction and massive injury.
It happened in 2013 in Chelyabinsk, Russia, when a 20 m wide asteroid moving at about 19 km / h exploded, causing more than 1,000 injuries. In 1908, an asteroid 50-100 m wide flattened around 80 million trees in a Siberian forest.
“These are, if you like, warning shots to tell us that we can be hit by these things.
“The ones we need to worry about are much bigger. [They] you don’t hit the ground very often, but [they] hit the ground, “Steel said.
