An enormous asteroid that’s bigger than the Empire State Building will fly by Earth next week. There’s no need to bunker down and prepare yourself for a nuclear explosion-like jolt. Scientists say there’s little chance it will hit our planet.
NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies says the enormous space rock, which measures up to 1,870 feet in diameter, is expected to make its closest approach to Earth at 3:23 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, on Saturday, Aug. 10.
Classified as 2006 QQ23, the asteroid is about 1,870 feet in diameter, dwarfing the asteroid about 187 to 427 feet in diameter that whizzed by July 25, coming within 45,000 miles of Earth.
Astronomers missed that surprise visitor, named Asteroid 2019 OK.
Michael Brown, a Melbourne, Australia-based observational astronomer who is an associate professor at Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, told The Washington Post the space rock “came out of nowhere” and made an “uncomfortably close” approach.
“It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” Brown said, noting, “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”
Asteroid 2019 OK’s approach came just a few days after a car-sized asteroid blew up in the atmosphere over the Caribbean Sea south of Puerto Rico, causing a spectacular fireball. About 13 to 16 feet in diameter, the meteor had been discovered only a couple of hours before it hit.
Asteroids Pose A Genuine Risk
The risk large asteroids pose to Earth is genuine. Astronomers at the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies closely track them. Collisions that have happened in the past had the same impact as a nuclear explosion.
In 1908, the Tunguska meteor explosion in Russia flattened about 770 square miles of forest. The 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor that broke up over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, shattered glass and injured about 1,200 people. It was detected from monitoring stations as far away as Antarctica, and some scientists said it was so bright that it outshone the sun.
Fortunately, Asteroid 2006 QQ23 is expected to stay safely away when it buzzes Earth on Aug. 10. Hurtling through space at speeds of around 10,400 mph, it will come within about 4.6 million miles of Earth. A collision with Earth by an asteroid this large would lcause colossal damage, triggering tsunamis if it hit the ocean or even global climatic changes that could prevail for years.
Scientists are aware of about 20,000 Near-Earth Objects, most of them asteroids, and make about 30 new discoveries each week. But NASA estimates that about two-thirds of space rocks in our solar system that are larger than 460 feet in diameter haven’t yet been discovered.
‘Gentle Nudge Rather Than Vicious Kick’
As with many things, the best defense is a good offense. In 1998, Congress directed NASA to establish a program to detect, track and project future close approaches to Earth of space rocks and other Near-Earth Objects.
NASA says asteroid impacts are the only potentially preventable natural disaster. The space agency and its partners are studying several different approaches to deflecting a hazardous asteroid, the most advanced of which is called the Double-Asteroid Redirection Test, slated to launch in 2021.
In the test, a smart car-sized spacecraft will slam into its target at a speed of about 13,000 mph. Among the things scientists hope the test will show is how much the orbit of asteroids can be changed.
If scientists are able to find a hazardous asteroid a decade or more before a potential impact, there likely would be time to launch a deflection mission to shift its orbit and avoid a collision with Earth.
Brown, the Melbourne astronomer, wrote in The Conversation the strategy would give the asteroid a “gentle nudge rather than a vicious kick.”
Destroying the asteroid isn’t a good option, he wrote, because it could create multiple destructive asteroids. But the more scientists know, the better the chances are to “avoid annihilation,” Brown wrote.
“With just a day or week’s notice, we would be in real trouble, but with more notice there are options,” he wrote.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx is currently visiting the asteroid Bennu, and Japan’s Hayabusa2 is monitoring the asteroid Ryugu on discovery missions. The video below explains more about that.