Asteroids are whizzing past Earth all the time, though they
don’t come too close to hitting us. NASA has now predicted another fly by the
incident to occur next month, but it’s slightly different.
For one thing, the space agency is saying the rock that’ll
hurtle past us is the largest near-Earth object (NEO) we’ve seen since we began
tracking them 20 years ago.
Measuring 4.4 km across, asteroid Florence, as it’s called,
is more than large enough to cause massive destruction, were it to hit Earth.
Even the 20 m wide Chelyabinsk meteorite that made contact in 2013 wrought
havoc, and any object larger than 1 km impacting Earth could cause a global
extinction. And NASA has tracked over 880 such NEOs in our vicinity.
But, though asteroid Florence is about making its closest
pass of Earth at a distance of 7 million km, the space agency there’s no chance
of a collision anytime in the next 500 years.
“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth
than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,”
says Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies
(CNEOS). “Florence is the largest asteroid to pass by our planet this close
since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began.”
The rock will zip past our planet on September 1, and will
be visible to small telescopes for a few nights from late August to early
September.
