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Astronomer captures footage of 3,280ft asteroid as it nears Earth - Daily Mail

Astronomer captures footage of 3,280ft asteroid as it nears Earth - Daily Mail

Astronomer captures footage of 3,280ft asteroid as it nears Earth - Daily Mail
Jan 19, 2022 2 mins, 22 secs

An astronomer has captured footage of a huge asteroid 3,451 feet in diameter as it made its closest approach to Earth in almost 90 years.

The following evening, at 21:51 GMT (16:51 EST) on January 18, the asteroid made its closest approach to Earth since 1933, coming within 1.2 million miles of our planet. .

The last known approach this close was in 1933, when it was 699,000 miles from the Earth. .

'We captured several images of the potentially hazardous asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 while safely approaching us,' said Masi. .

NASA puts the diameter of asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) as 3,451 feet (1.052km), much larger than the tallest building on Earth, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which measures 2,722 feet.  .

Following its close approach on Tuesday, 7482 (1994 PC1) won't be this close to Earth again until the year 2105, according to NASA JPL-Caltech's Solar System Dynamics.     .

Asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) was first discovered by Australian astronomers in 1994 and made a close approach of Earth this week.

NASA puts the diameter of asteroid 7482 (1994 PC1) as 3,451 feet (1.052km), much larger than the tallest building on Earth.

Its orbit is very well known, according to astronomers, and varies from 0.9 AU to 1.8 AU, where 1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun. .

The massive asteroid, more than twice the size of the Empire State Building in New York, came within 1.2 million miles of the Earth.

NASA says none of the known asteroids are expected to collide with the Earth at any point in the near future, but there are asteroids whose orbits aren't known.  

It defines 7482 (1994 PC1) as a near-Earth object (NEO) and a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA). 

The space rock, called 7482 (1994 PC1), poses no threat to the Earth as it will be five times further away from the planet than the Moon, as it shoots by at 43,000 mph (pictured, an artist's impression of an asteroid)

On average, Earth is hit by a football pitch-sized rock every 5,000 years, and a civilisation-ending asteroid every one million years, according to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program.      

Deflecting an asteroid such as Bennu, which has a small chance of hitting Earth in about a century and a half, could require multiple small impacts from some sort of massive human-made deflection device, according to experts

Bennu also has a one-in-2,700 chance of hitting Earth on the afternoon of September 24, 2182, according to the NASA study.  

Scientists have been seriously considering how to stop an asteroid from ever hitting Earth since the 1960s, but previous approaches have generally involved theories on how to blow the cosmic object into thousands of pieces

A more recent approach, called kinetic impact deflection (KID), involves firing something into space that more gently bumps the asteroid off course, away from Earth, while keeping it intact. 

'Although the chances of it hitting Earth are very low, Bennu remains one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, along with another asteroid called 1950 DA,' NASA said in a statement.     

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