Cosmic shock: 2-km-wide asteroid to fly past Earth on Wednesday

A two-kilometre-wide “potentially hazardous”asteroid is set to pass by Earth on Wednesday, NASA said, adding that the spacerock will pose no danger to our home planet in this fly by.

The asteroid, called 1998 OR2, will make its closestapproach at 5.55 a.m. EDT (3.25 p.m. India time).

   

It will get no closer than 6.3 million kilometres, passingmore than 16 times farther away than the Moon, NASA said.

Asteroid 1998 OR2 was discovered by the Near-Earth AsteroidTracking program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in July 1998, and for thepast two decades astronomers have tracked it.

NASA said this asteroid poses no possibility of impact forat least the next 200 years.

Its next close approach to Earth will occur in 2079, when itwill pass by closer — only about four times the lunar distance.

Despite this, 1998 OR2 is still categorised as a large”potentially hazardous asteroid” because, over the course ofmillennia, very slight changes in the asteroid’s orbit may cause it to presentmore of a hazard to Earth than it does now.

This is one of the reasons why tracking this asteroid duringits close approach– using telescopes and especially ground-based radar — isimportant, as observations such as these will enable an even better long-termassessment of the hazard presented by this asteroid.

Close approaches by large asteroids like 1998 OR2 are quiterare.

The previous close approach by a large asteroid was made byasteroid Florence in September 2017.

That five-kilometre-wide object zoomed past Earth at 18lunar distances.

On average, NASA expects asteroids of this size to fly byour planet this close roughly once every five years.

Since they are bigger, asteroids of this size reflect muchmore light than smaller asteroids and are therefore easier to detect withtelescopes.

About 98 per cent all near-Earth asteroids of the size of1998 OR2 or larger have already been discovered, tracked and cataloged, the USspace agency said.

It is extremely unlikely there could be an impact over thenext century by one of these large asteroids, but efforts to discover allasteroids that could pose an impact hazard to Earth continue, it added.

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