This asteroid is a NEO ( Near Earth Object, for its acronym in English ), so its orbit will make it pass “close” to the orbital path of the Earth around the Sun.
The huge space rock, as wide as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge (which is over 2,700 meters long) known as 2001 FO32, is one of many “near-Earth objects” orbiting the sun in our cosmic neighborhood and will fly over us at full speed on March 21.
The asteroid has, as extracted from its brightness and the way it reflects light, approximately 0.8 to 1.7 kilometers in diameter and will reach 2 million kilometers from Earth at 17:03 pm peninsular time in its closest approximation.
Are we to fear a collision?
We can be calm . Although it passes close enough and is large enough to be classified as “potentially dangerous,” according to the database published by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is no reason to worry. In fact, the official designation of “potentially dangerous” refers to when the orbit of the object intersects that of the Earth at a distance of no more than 7.5 million kilometers and a diameter greater than about 140 meters, according to the POT.
How fast is this object traveling?
2001 FO32 will travel at astonishing speed relative to Earth at its closest approach: at about 124,000 kilometers per hour; about 100 times faster than the speed of sound and about a third faster than lightning when it travels from the atmosphere to the ground . A very fast cosmic traveler.
Monitoring asteroids
Bodies over about 100 meters in size cause explosions at ground level in the giga-ton range, or billions of tons. Such collisions would devastate entire countries. There is about a 1% chance that such an impact will occur in the next century.
As a curiosity, the US space agency, NASA, claims that about 25,000 NEOs have been identified so far, including a handful of comets and a large number of asteroids. Of all of them, only 2,100 have been classified as potentially dangerous . Due to the gravitational pull of various planets, the trajectories of asteroids are constantly changing, and there is a possibility that over centuries and millennia, changes in the orbits of these potentially dangerous NEOs will cause them to cross Earth’s orbit. That is why it is so important to track these asteroids in the coming decades to study the development in their orbits and any possible changes in their trajectories.
No known asteroid poses a significant risk to Earth for the next 100 years. The greatest currently known threat is an asteroid named (410777) 2009 FD, which has a less than 0.2% chance of hitting Earth in 2185 , according to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO).
Reference: NASA
