Giant asteroid expected to pass “close” to Earth on Friday (27)

NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (Cneos) reported that a giant asteroid, 1.8 kilometers in diameter will pass “close” to Earth between the afternoon and evening of this Friday (27).

Called 7335 (1989 JA), the rocky body was discovered in 1989 and is expected to pass at a distance of nearly 4 million kilometers from Earth — almost ten times the distance to the Moon — reaching a speed of about 47,232 km/h. , according to Cneos.

The asteroid is not expected to hit our planet, but still, it has been classified as “potentially dangerous”.

THE CNN Natasha Costa da Fonseca, a meteorite researcher at the Valongo Observatory, said that “the classification has a direct relationship with its size and knowledge of the orbit”.

“It means that there is some chance of hitting Earth, and if it did, that it is large enough to cause regional damage,” he explained.

But there is no reason to panic. Natasha points out the chance of collision is not great. “It happens all the time and normally those chances are very slim. But since they exist, we call them a Potentially Hazardous Object. It confuses a lot of people,” she stated.

According to her, objects with more than 50 meters are already capable of causing tsunamis and causing damage to the Earth.

NASA classifies as Potentially Hazardous Objects those that can approach at a minimum intersecting distance from Earth’s orbit of less than 0.05 au (astronomical unit) — or 7,480,000 kilometers.

The distance of 7335 (1989 JA) from Earth will be 0.026 au — or 3,889,544 kilometers.

The researcher claims that objects enter our planet daily, but they are usually very small and often barely survive passing through our atmosphere — they disintegrate.

“When they manage to get in, the biggest chance is that they will fall into the sea. When they fall to the ground and we manage to find them, they become meteorites,” he comments.

The space agency last year launched the DART, or Double Asteroid Redirection Test, mission with the aim of destroying Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting the near-Earth asteroid Didymos.

This will be the first large-scale demonstration of this type of technology by the agency on behalf of planetary defense. It will also be the first time that humans have measurably altered the dynamics of a solar system body, according to the European Space Agency.

Source: CNN Brasil

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