An asteroid as large as the Golden Gate Bridge is lengthy will hurtle past Earth subsequent month. But though it will be the largest and speediest asteroid to fly by our planet this 12 months, there isn’t any motive to panic.
The area rock, formally known as 231937 (2001 FO32), is about 0.5 to 1 mile (0.8 to 1.7 kilometers) in diameter and will come inside 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) of Earth at 11:03 a.m. EST (1603 GMT) on March 21 — shut sufficient and enormous sufficient to be labeled as “potentially hazardous,” in accordance with a database printed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
An asteroid is designated as “potentially hazardous” when its orbit intersects with Earth’s at a distance of not more than about 4.65 million miles (7.5 million km) and it’s larger than about 500 toes (140 meters) in diameter, in accordance with NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
Related: The 7 strangest asteroids: Weird area rocks in our photo voltaic system
Small asteroids go between Earth and the moon a number of instances a month, and their fragments enter and break up in Earth’s ambiance virtually every day, in accordance with NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO).
Telescopes in New Mexico which might be half of the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program — an MIT Lincoln Laboratory program funded by the U.S. Air Force and NASA — detected the asteroid on March 23, 2001, in accordance with EarthSky. Observatories have monitored it ever since. Scientists used these observations to calculate the asteroid’s orbit and decide how shut the area rock will come to Earth when it whizzes by at virtually 77,000 mph (124,000 km/h).
No identified asteroid poses a big threat to Earth for the subsequent 100 years. The present largest identified menace is an asteroid known as (410777) 2009 FD, which has a 1 in 714 (lower than 0.2%) probability of hitting Earth in 2185, in accordance with NASA’s PDCO.
NASA is finding out strategies of deflecting asteroids that do find yourself on a collision course with Earth, comparable to through the use of the gravity of a flying spacecraft to slowly pull asteroids off their trajectory to a secure distance, in accordance with NASA’s PDCO.
If you’ve a telescope with an aperture of at the least 8 inches (20 centimeters), you may be capable to spot the fast-moving area rock, in accordance with EarthSky. To catch a glimpse in the southern U.S., level your telescope south-southeast between the constellations of Sagittarius and Corona Australis at 4:45 a.m. EST on March 20.
Originally printed on Live Science.