Every year thousands of space objects enter our planet’s atmosphere. Most disintegrate before reaching the ground, and all are too small to do any significant damage.
Some bodies even cross the orbit of our planet giving us amazing astronomical shows. But from there to a crash big enough to endanger life on Earth, there is a way. A cataclysm considered a ‘great impact’ occurs on Earth approximately every 100,000 years.
Even so, it is easy to panic whenever it is announced that a stellar body will pass ‘relatively close’ to our planet, or even ‘brush’ it.
The latest of these announcements has occurred with the asteroid called 2016 NF23, which is approaching, for some, ‘dangerously close’ to Earth. But the truth is that the trajectory of this object does not pose any risk to us. Let’s see next why there is no cause for alarm.
Despite some tabloid statements, the body poses no danger to Earth. /POT.
Potentially Dangerous Asteroids are currently defined based on parameters that measure the potential of the asteroid to make threatening approaches to Earth. It is true that 2016 NF23 is classified by NASA as a NEO or Earth Close Approaches object.
Despite his status, he’s still far enough away that we don’t even have to think about him.
2016 NF23 passes the early morning of Wednesday, August 29 at 3:38 UTC (5:38 Spanish time) at approximately 13.2 lunar distances (LD). One LD is the distance between the Earth and the Moon, so 13.2 LD would equal more than 5 million kilometers of distance, considerably far from our planet.
How is 2016 NF23?
NASA estimates that this asteroid is between 70 and 160 meters in diameter, which means that it could be larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza (which is 146 meters high). But this size is not, say, excessively large by the standard for asteroids. Take Ceres as an example, which is approximately 950 kilometers wide.
In the case of the asteroid that swept through the largest land animals (including dinosaurs) 65 million years ago, it was about 10 kilometers across. That is to say: at the exact moment of contact with the ground, it would have measured more than Everest and similar to passenger flights.
For its part, 2016 NF23 is defined by NASA as massive and travels at around 20,000 miles per hour (faster than a bullet). Its speed may seem terrifying, but rocky objects regularly fly close to Earth at that speed.
But, in fact, there are many (albeit smaller) objects flying closer than 1 LD to Earth. Additionally, as of August 2018, NASA reports some 1,912 potentially dangerous asteroids in and around Earth.
However, scientists do not deny that the Earth will again suffer a significantly large impact. In fact, they are sure that it will happen, but in all probability, the next time it happens it will have taken tens of thousands of years.
It may be that, by then, humans are no longer on the face of the Earth, it may be because we disappear, or because we have even already abandoned our rock in search of new homes, as Stephen Hawking argued.
