“It has no chance to hit the Earth, currently,” said Sheppard, noting that at present 2022 AP7 crosses the Earth's orbit when the Earth is on the other side of the sun.
Fortunately, those asteroids were small and didn't cause any damage. NASA has estimated the trajectories of all the near-Earth objects beyond the end of the century. Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years, according to NASA.
This planet-killer asteroid orbits the Sun every five years. The study says that asteroid 2022 AP7 currently crosses the orbit of the Earth when it is on the other side of the Sun. This asteroid is potentially hazardous due to its humongous size and has the potential of causing mass extinction on Earth.
It's important to stress that 2023 PDC is a purely hypothetical object and it isn't on course to impact Earth. In fact, currently, there are no large asteroids predicted to hit Earth for the next 100 years.
Asteroid 2023 JS4 terror
As per NASA's asteroid data tracking page, Asteroid 2023 JS4 is set to make a close approach to Earth today, May 18, at a distance of merely 3.86 million miles, while hurtling through space at a rapid speed of 49682 kilometres per hour.
NASA has issued a warning regarding an alarming asteroid that is on its way, which will come dangerously close to Earth. This asteroid, known as Asteroid 2023 JD, will get astonishingly close to earth at just 821,000 miles.
At this early stage, with not many observations yet recorded, both systems agreed that the asteroid was most likely to strike on 29 April 2027 – more than eight years away – with a probability of impact of about 1 in 50 000.
There is currently no known significant threat of impact for the next hundred years or more.
About 66 million years ago, a space rock 6 miles (10 kilometers) wide now called the Chicxulub impactor slammed into Earth off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Sixty-six million years ago, dinosaurs had the ultimate bad day. With a devastating asteroid impact, a reign that had lasted 180 million years was abruptly ended. Prof Paul Barrett, a dinosaur researcher at the Museum, explains what is thought to have happened the day the dinosaurs died.
Four billion years from now, the increase in Earth's surface temperature will cause a runaway greenhouse effect, creating conditions more extreme than present-day Venus and heating Earth's surface enough to melt it. By that point, all life on Earth will be extinct.
“Any asteroid over 1km in size is considered a planet killer,” said Sheppard, adding that should such an object strike Earth, the impact would be devastating to life as we know it, with dust and pollutants kicked up into the atmosphere, where they would linger for years.
The two asteroids which are considered "planet killers" are 2021 PH27 and 2022 AP7.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists Lance Benner, Paul Chodas and Mark Haynes are studying the 1,100-foot wide asteroid Apophis, which will come within viewing distance of Earth on April 13, 2029. To be clear: The asteroid is not going to hit us.
The more energy is released, the more damage is likely to occur on the ground due to the environmental effects triggered by the impact. Such effects can be shock waves, heat radiation, the formation of craters with associated earthquakes, and tsunamis if water bodies are hit.
Small asteroids fly past every day, but one of this size coming so close to Earth only happens around once every 10 years, he added. The asteroid will pass 175,000 kilometres (109,000 miles) from Earth at a speed of 28,000 kilometres per hour (17,400 miles per hour).
No! After the dinosaurs died out, nearly 65 million years passed before people appeared on Earth. However, small mammals (including shrew-sized primates) were alive at the time of the dinosaurs.
The planet Earth has been around for more than 4.5 billion years. And in the course of its history it has been hit by asteroids at least 190 times. But there were three particular occasions when the asteroid was so large and the impact crater it created was so wide, scientists are sure it would have ended humanity!
NASA scientists say it would take an asteroid 60 miles (96 kilometers) wide to totally wipe out life on Earth. Asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos are seen less than three minutes before NASA's DART spacecraft made impact.
The possibility that a black hole could actually impact Earth may seem straight out of science fiction, but the reality is that microscopic primordial black holes could actually hit Earth. If one did, it wouldn't just impact like an asteroid, it'd pass straight through the entire Earth and exit the other side.
Their experiments showed that blowing up a 200-meter asteroid would require a bomb 200 times as powerful as the one that exploded over Hiroshima in 1945. They also said it would be most effective to drill into the asteroid, bury the bomb, then blow it up—just like in the movie Armageddon.
It also for a time had a small chance of hitting Earth in 2036. Additional observations have shown it will not hit Earth in 2029 or in 2036.
Asteroid onslaught
"We know today that it will also not hit the Earth in the year 2050, but the close flyby in 2050 might deflect the asteroid such that it could hit the Earth in the year 2079," Rüdiger Jehn of the European Space Agency told AFP.
There was a small but definite risk, about one in 500, that its orbit, and Earth's, might coincide on 21 September 2030 - a danger that has been verified over the past 72 hours by a group of International Astronomical Union experts in Italy, Finland and the US.
In-depth. Initial observations of an asteroid dubbed '2022 AE1' showed a potential Earth impact on 4 July 2023 – not enough time to attempt deflection and large enough to do real damage to a local area should it strike.