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Yesterday, when the UK rose for another day of self-isolation, a huge asteroid it shot past Earth, losing our planet by about 3.9 million miles (which isn’t really that much, spatially).
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about right now, right?
The asteroid, called Catchy 52768 (1998 OR2), approached Earth around 11 a.m. yesterday. It may seem like it wasn’t close to us at all, but this distance is actually classified as a “close focus” by POT.
The massive asteroid is estimated to be between 1.8 km and 4.1 km in diameter. To put it in perspective, that’s about five times bigger than the world’s largest building, the Burj Khalifa, or about a mile from its government-ordered jog.
Scientists at the Virtual Telescope Project in Rome hosted a live broadcast of the asteroid last night, showing the space rock as it flew through the night sky. Gian Masi, who presented the live broadcast, said:
We know where the asteroid is because we know its orbit. And this same orbit allows us to say “it won’t hit us.”
Telescope images have captured the asteroid flying through the sky (it’s the bright white spot, for the uninitiated)
NASA has not ruled out the possibility that an asteroid may collide with Earth in the future. They discover around 30 new “Near Earth Objects” (NEOs) every week, most of which are very small, but sometimes, as in this case, they are much larger.
However, worryingly, NASA said an unforeseen impact is possible at any time.
Experts estimate that the impact of an object the size of the one that exploded in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, about 55 feet (17 meters) in size, occurs once or twice a century.
Impacts from larger objects are expected to be much less frequent (on the scale of centuries to millennia).
However, given the current incompleteness of the NEO catalog, an unforeseen impact, such as the Chelyabinsk event, could occur at any time.
