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Huge asteroid passes Earth at 43,000 miles per hour next week - Daily Mail

Huge asteroid passes Earth at 43,000 miles per hour next week - Daily Mail

Huge asteroid passes Earth at 43,000 miles per hour next week - Daily Mail
Jan 13, 2022 2 mins, 51 secs

It will safely pass within 1.2 million miles of Earth – marking the closest it has been to our planet since 1933 when it was 699,000 miles away. .

A massive asteroid, more than twice the size of the Empire State Building in New York, will come within 1.2 million miles of the Earth on January 18, according to NASA.

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).

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

NEOs are an asteroid or comet whose orbit brings it into or through a zone between approximately 91 million and 121 million miles (195 million km) from the Sun, meaning that it can pass within about 30 million miles (50 million km) of Earth’s orbit (stock image) .

NEOs are an asteroid or comet whose orbit brings it into or through a zone between approximately 91 million and 121 million miles (195 million km) from the Sun, meaning that it can pass within about 30 million miles (50 million km) of Earth’s orbit. .

While neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth, DART's kinetic impact will prove that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and kinetically impact it. 

In an attempt to tackle the threat of asteroids that may one day get a little too close for comfort, NASA formed a planetary defence program, that includes the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, that launched in November

It is heading for the small moonlet asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger companion asteroid called Didymos

While neither asteroid poses a threat to Earth, DART's kinetic impact will prove that a spacecraft can autonomously navigate to a target asteroid and kinetically impact it

The DART technique could prove useful for altering the course of an asteroid years or decades before it bears down on Earth with the potential for catastrophe

DART will smash into Dimorphos, which orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, at 13,500 miles per hour (21,700 km per hour)

A small nudge 'would add up to a big change in its future position, and then the asteroid and the Earth wouldn't be on a collision course,' NASA said

'Although there isn't a currently known asteroid that's on an impact course with the Earth, we do know that there is a large population of near-Earth asteroids out there,' said Lindley Johnson, NASA's Planetary Defense Officer

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

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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