It is the asteroid 2006 QV89 , a space rock of 40 meters in diameter that, on Monday, September 9, at 09:03 in the morning (Spanish time), could hit the Earth at 44,000 kilometers per hour, according to have exposed experts at the Asteroid Detection and Space Debris Conference held in Darmstadt (Germany). But don’t worry, the probability of an impact occurring is very small: 1 in 11,428.
“With the data we have now, the probability of impact is equivalent to that of being run over by a train if we cross a track blindly, without being able to see or hear if the train is coming, but knowing that one passes every fifteen hours,” he says. Ettore Perozzi, from the Italian Space Agency (ASI).
The asteroid is ranked number 7 on the list of asteroids potentially most dangerous to Earth in the next 100 years. Recall that the risk that an asteroid is potentially dangerous is estimated from the Palermo Scale, which takes into account the size of each rock, the probability of impact and the time remaining until the possible collision.
Of course, until the month of July its exact trajectory and probability of collision will not be known.
Some experts assure that the fate of the aforementioned asteroid will be that it will explode in the atmosphere, so that its shock wave would only cause damage in low proportions, such as the Chelyabinsk event (Russia) in 2013, when a rock of about 20 meters caused some 1,000 injuries.
This was not the case in Tugunska, Siberia when in 1908 a meteorite devastated an area of 2,000 square kilometers and felled 80 million trees. Something similar could happen in the month of September if it finally ends up impacting the Earth. Something that is hardly feasible, at the moment.
NASA’s near-Earth object hunter NEOWISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) discovered in 2018 ten space rocks classified as potentially dangerous for our planet.
Top 10 Asteroid Threats
29075 (1950 AD) that would impact in 2880
101955 Bennu (1999 RQ36) that would hit 2175-2199
410777 (2009 FD) that would impact 2185-2198
(1979 XB) that would impact in 2056-2113
(2007 FT3) that would impact in 2019-2116
99942 Apophis (2004 MN4) that would impact in 2060-2105
(2010 KV21) that would impact in 2021-2116
(2010 GD37) that would impact in 2019-2101
(2001 CA21) that would impact in 2020-2073
(2016 NL56) that would impact in 2023-2118
Upcoming performances
In 2022 , NASA will send the DART spacecraft to deflect the moon Didymoon from the asteroid Didymos in an attempt to participate in an “Armageddon Plan” – using explosives to try to change the course of the asteroids.
The European Space Agency, in turn, will send the HERA operation in 2023 and test the same theory from another space fragment known as the asteroid (65803) Didymos – as large as the Great Pyramid of Egypt – from the same orbit.
Source: NEOWISE, NASA.
