NASA Warns Massive “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid" [COMING NEAR]

 

Whether it's don't look up the latest Hollywood release to highlight a celestial wanderer smashing into earth or armageddon and deep impact there's a long history of fascination with the cosmos deadly arsenal colliding with the little blue marble we call home in just days a kilometer wide asteroid or two and a half times the height of the empire state building will be uncomfortably close to us nasa has designated it as a potentially hazardous asteroid and it is hurtling towards the center of the solar system faster than its predecessor that ended the age of the dinosaurs Welcome the Science Reads in today's article we examine the threat to humanity posed by this visitor and others in our cosmic neighborhood along with what nasa is doing right this minute to prepare for the planet-changing event astronomers say is coming according to nasa earth is hit by over 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles every day and 17 times per day on average some are big enough to survive the atmospheric burn and reach the surface our earth getting pelted by space rocks is nothing new and twice since the beginning of the 20th century we have examples of large impacts and their potential devastation on June 30th 1908 the Tunguska explosion leveled an area of Siberia nearly the size of Tokyo destroying approximately 772 square miles with the energy equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs the devastation is believed to be from a comet or asteroid impacting the atmosphere and for decades it was thought to have been roughly 100 feet wide however recent supercomputer simulations point towards a much smaller object perhaps only 65 feet in diameter causing the destruction and most scientists believe

 the impact was from an asteroid

 principally due to the much higher population of our rocky neighbors compared to nearby comets in the interest of fairness there are a myriad of other explanations for Tunguska floating around from an underground explosion to

 ufos black holes and death rays

 far more recent was the spectacular chelyabinsk meteor which broke up over the Russian city on February 15 2013. around 700 people were injured in the blast that was stronger than a nuclear explosion and monitoring stations thousands of miles away registered the impact this asteroid was about the size of a six-story building so in just over a century humanity has seen the destructive capabilities of earth impacts from objects roughly 65 to 98 feet wide and now a large rocky asteroid measuring 3280 feet wide or 1000 meters is hurtling towards us according to MIT an asteroid of this size strikes the earth once every 600,000 years on average as of January 8 2022 NASA and JPL center for near-earth object studies has identified 885 near-earth asteroids measuring one kilometer or greater in size in 2016 the national center for atmospheric research in boulder Colorado modeled the effects on earth's atmospheric conditions if a one kilometer wide asteroid struck the planet if this happens we can only hope that the impact is in the ocean a previous study showed that the salt water vapor lifted into the atmosphere would severely impact the ozone layer resulting in radiation levels high enough to force people to stay indoors during daylight hours and with 70 of our planet covered by oceans that's the more likely event even so that still leaves a 30 chance of landfall and what is the result of this event according to the 2016 study disaster as in a mini ice age disaster a nine mile wide crater and huge amounts of dust would be propelled into the atmosphere and that's before the enormous wildfires assuming the strike was not in a desert send smoke and sod up along with it average global temperatures would plunge to ice age levels and ozone levels would temporarily fall about 55 for up to two years the amount of sunlight reaching earth's surface is reduced up to 70 percent and the drastic cooling would drop worldwide precipitation by about 50 oh and a roughly 50 drop in plant productivity meaning yet another disaster for humanity remember that 600 000 year average interval for massive impacts of asteroids one kilometer wide or larger being an average does not in any way mean that's a regularly spaced interval so while estimates vary for extinction

 level-sized asteroids from 10 times the size of our soon to be visitor to much greater an earth impact from one the size of our visitor known innocuously as asteroid 7482 1994 pc1 our visitor was discovered on August 9 1994 by astronomer Robert Mcnaught at the siding spring observatory in Australia astronomers since then have traced it back to september 1974 so much is known about its past and future trajectories it is in a big hurry the asteroid is racing by at 43 754 miles per hour or 19.56 kilometers per second and this time astronomers say we are safe from disasters as 1994 pc1 will miss us by 1.2 million miles the last time this particular asteroid hurtled by earth was in 1933 and that was at a much closer 699 000 miles keep in mind that we are not immune to surprise visits and close calls from wanderers we are not tracking on october 21st 2021 an asteroid the size of a refrigerator snuck by watchers and passed within a minuscule 1800 miles of antarctica not close enough to worry about then consider 2020 vt4 at 16 to 32 feet across the size of a small house skimmed by at a mere 238 miles from earth's surface on november 13 2020 and we discovered it on the 14th the day after in an effort to change our current status as sitting dogs nasa's double asteroid redirection test launched on november 24th 2021 has humanity's first full-scale mission to literally collide with a binary asteroid its goal assess whether a kinetic impact could redirect an object that is on course to collide with earth the target is dimorphose a 530 foot wide moonlit that orbits the larger didimos asteroid between september 26 and october 1st 2022 dart will rendezvous with a pair roughly 6.8 million miles from earth and slam directly into one of them how will astronomers know the effect of the intentional collision dart is being followed by a small companion the light italian cubesat for imaging of asteroids provided by the italian space agency

 dart's wingmen will capture images of the collision and its effect and the european space agency's hera project will follow up roughly four years later to closely study both asteroids feeling any safer so what do you think about this cosmic visitor that will hurtle by us in just a few days are you excited for our worldwide efforts to not only recognize threats to humanity before they happen but actually prepare a way to defend ourselves tell us in the comments and as always

 thank you for reading Science Reads