Scientists at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have warned about a 100 feet long asteroid named Asteroid 2023 HY3 is expected to make its closest approach to Earth today.
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.
There is currently no known significant threat of impact for the next hundred years or more.
Do we know of any asteroids that pose a threat to Earth? No known asteroid poses a significant risk of impact with Earth over the next 100 years.
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.
An asteroid, named "2019 PDC", was discovered that will come dangerously close to the earth 8 years from now, on April 29, 2027. The space rock is between 330 and 1000 feet in size, somewhere in between the length of 6.5 school buses to the height of two Washington Monuments stacked on top of each other.
The space agency announced this week that new telescope observations have ruled out any chance of Apophis smacking Earth in 2068. That's the same 1,100-foot (340-meter) space rock that was supposed to come frighteningly close in 2029 and again in 2036.
“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.
An asteroid on a trajectory to impact Earth could not be shot down in the last few minutes or even hours before impact. No known weapon system could stop the mass because of the velocity at which it travels – an average of 12 miles per second.
When the 6-mile-wide asteroid that led to dinosaur extinction hit Earth 66 million years ago, the impact also triggered a “mega-earthquake” that lasted weeks to months, new evidence suggests.
A newly discovered asteroid may make a perilously close approach to Earth about 20 years from now, with a roughly 1-in-600 chance that the space rock will collide directly with our planet, officials with NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office tweeted.
When could asteroid 2023 DW hit Earth? The asteroids closest approach to Earth will be on Feb. 14, 2046.
The closest known approach of Apophis occurs at April 13, 2029 21:46 UT, when Apophis will pass Earth closer than geosynchronous communication satellites, but will come no closer than 31,600 kilometres (19,600 mi) above Earth's surface.
Based on those two methods, researchers estimate that an asteroid or comet 1 kilometer wide or larger hits the planet every 600,000 to 700,000 years.
Asteroid 1990 MU, which is currently orbiting around the Sun, may come significantly close to the Earth by June 6, 2027.
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.
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.
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. This is the last image to include a complete view of both asteroids.
This could be done by impacting it with a non-destructive projectile, simply tugging the asteroid into a different orbit with a nearby high-mass spacecraft, ablating the asteroid's surface with a high-power laser (or a nearby nuclear explosion), or by placing small rockets on the asteroid's surface.
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.
Theia is a hypothesized ancient planet in the early Solar System that, according to the giant-impact hypothesis, collided with the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, with some of the resulting ejected debris gathering to form the Moon.
Believe it or not, some animals and other organisms survived the mass extinction. Crocodiles, small mammals, and even some tenacious plants, for example, managed to live on after the asteroid impact.
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.
The prehistoric Chicxulub impact, 66 million years ago, believed to be the cause of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, was caused by an asteroid estimated to be about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) wide.