Good news Earthlings, we survived a “potential” asteroid collision.
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Termed Asteroid 86666 (2000 FL10), it is due to make its closest pass on Saturday, Daily Mail reported.
For comparison’s sake, the moon is about 238,000 miles from Earth.
The closest that Didymoon has got to Earth in recent times was in 2003, when it came as near as 4.46 million miles away.
While you were tucked up in bed this morning a two-mile wide asteroid had a “near miss” with Earth – 15 million miles away.
“There is no scientific basis – not one shred of evidence – that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates”, says Nasa’s Paul Chodas. The agency’s office is at Pasadena, California’s, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The whole “deadly asteroid” scenario is a trope in apocalypse and superhero movies, but an asteroid colliding with Earth is actually a very real possibility, and NASA wants to be prepared. In February 2013, a meteor streaked through the skies of Russia’s Ural region and exploded.
In 2012, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) made the announcement that they would work together to study any potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids; furthermore, they said they will join forces to figure out how to best deflect or destroy them in order to save our planet from certain destruction. The ESA will launch a satellite to gather data on the asteroid, and then NASA will launch an enormous battering ram to hit the asteroid and hopefully nudge it off course.
The blog went on to clarify that “all known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01per cent chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years”.
Nasa’s ship called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, will be responsible for hitting Didymoon, while the European vehicle will map its change in orbit around Didymos, and will monitor the material that is ejected from the rock’s surface following impact.
There’s even a day dedicated to improving asteroid detection and monitoring.
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Michel also comments, “AIM will provide first direct measurement of the internal structure of a small asteroid”.
