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Massive asteroid the size of London’s Big Ben will whiz past Earth tomorrow at dizzying speeds of up to 29,000 mph, NASA reveals
- NASA has revealed that a massive asteroid will come within 3.4 million miles of Earth
- The space agency classifies it as “near Earth” and says it is “potentially dangerous.”
The idea of an asteroid the size of London’s Big Ben whizzing past our planet may sound like the plot of the latest sci-fi blockbuster.
But it will become a reality tomorrow, when a space rock will come within 3.4 million miles of Earth.
While that may sound far off, NASA classifies it as a “near Earth” approach and even says this asteroid is “potentially dangerous.”
The asteroid, named ‘2023 JD2’, has an estimated diameter of 110 meters.
To put that into perspective, it’s taller than Big Ben in London and the Statue of Liberty in New York, which are 96 meters and 93 meters tall respectively.
The asteroid, named ‘2023 JD2’, has an estimated diameter of 110 meters. To put that in perspective, it’s taller than both Big Ben in London and the Statue of Liberty in New York, which are 96 meters and 93 meters tall respectively.
The asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth tomorrow at 19:52 GMT.
At that point, according to NASA, it will be about 0.03 au (3.4 million miles) away from us, traveling at dizzying speeds of up to 29,000 mph.
“Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that bring them within 120 million miles (195 million kilometers) of the sun, meaning they can circulate through Earth’s orbit,” NASA explains.
“Most near-Earth objects are asteroids that range in size from about 10 feet (a few meters) to nearly 25 miles (40 kilometers) across.”
Although the chance of this asteroid hitting Earth is extremely small, NASA has not ruled out the risk of an asteroid collision in the near future.
NASA discovers about 30 new near-Earth objects (NEOs) each week and had discovered a total of more than 19,000 objects by early 2019.
However, the space agency has warned that its NEO catalog is not complete, meaning an unpredictable impact could occur at “any moment.”
NASA explained: “Experts estimate that an impact of an object the size of the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 – about 17 meters in size – happens once or twice a century.
Although the chance of this asteroid hitting Earth is extremely small, NASA has not ruled out the risk of an asteroid collision in the near future (stock image)
‘It is expected that the effects of larger objects will be much less frequent (on the scale of centuries to millennia).
“However, given the current incompleteness of the NEO catalog, an unforeseen impact can occur at any time, such as the Chelyabinsk event.”
To prepare for such an impact, NASA recently launched its first-ever “planetary defense mission” to deflect an asteroid 6.8 million miles from Earth.
A small spacecraft successfully deflected a space rock by ramming into it as part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.
The craft’s target was a moonlet named Dimorphos orbiting its parent asteroid Didymos.
On September 26, DART took off at 15,000 mph toward Dimorphos to knock it out of orbit.
And on March 1, 2023, NASA confirmed that the mission was a resounding success.
The refrigerator-sized satellite managed to skim the orbit of a 520-foot-wide asteroid for 33 minutes — nearly five times larger than predicted, according to Cristina Thomas and her colleagues at Northern Arizona University.
They concluded: ‘To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART had to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target’s trajectory could be altered.
“DART has successfully done both.”