Asteroid will pass close to Earth

An asteroid, listed by NASA as “potentially dangerous” due to its size and trajectory, will approach Earth on March 21. It is a space rock named 231,937 (2001 FO32), the diameter is between 0.8 and 1.7 kilometers.

Although it will be the fastest and closest asteroid to our planet in all of 2021, its position will maintain a reasonable distance at its point of maximum approach to Earth orbit: 2 million kilometers.

An asteroid is considered “potentially dangerous” by the CNEOS (Center for the Study of Objects Near Earth) when its orbit approaches that of Earth at a distance of less than 7.5 million kilometers, and its size is over 459 feet in diameter.

This “space visitor” was discovered by telescopes from the LINEAR (Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research) program located in New Mexico, in the United States. Since then, observatories have been monitoring it. It is known to travel at the striking speed of 124,000 miles per hour.

According to NASA, there is no asteroid that poses a real risk to our planet in the next 100 years. The most alarming is called 410,777 (2009 FD) and has less than 0.2% chance of hitting the Earth in 2185, although the monitoring system for potentially dangerous objects (Sentry) is being updated as they go discovering new space rocks.

What if …?

“Currently, the impact of an asteroid is the only natural disaster we could prevent. There are some methods that NASA is studying to divert an asteroid from its impact course on Earth,” the northern space agency explains. -americana on your website.

One of these techniques would be to use a “gravity tractor,” a spacecraft that would approach the asteroid to accompany its path and use gravitational attraction between two bodies to deflect it.

Another option that is evaluated in the face of a hypothetical risk is a controlled nuclear detonation, positioned near the surface of the asteroid, although this variable is considered a last resort.

According to NASA, the “simplest and most technologically mature solution for asteroid defense” at this time is a kinetic impact. With this technique, an aircraft would be launched to hit an asteroid at high speed and modify its orbit. In fact, this option will be evaluated with the 2022 DART mission (Double Asteroid Steering Test) in which a car the size of a car will collide at 25,000 kilometers per hour against Didymos B, the smallest of the duo of asteroids Didymos – which do not pose a risk to Earth – to see how much its course changes.