By NASA ALert: 260-Foot Asteroid Moving Towards Earth Today. Know all the details.
NASA has confirmed that a massive skyscraper-sized asteroid is all set to take a closer look towards our home planet today. It is the Asteroid 2024 JR17 which is speeding at fiery speed on June 5th. NASA’s JPL data has revealed that this upcoming asteroid is a 260-foot-wide space rock (79 meters) which is as big as a giant building. It is moving at a speed of 52321 km per second to make its closest distance towards Earth around 11:37 PM IST. Asteroid 2024 JR17 will be just 4.6 million miles away from Earth.
This is an Apollo asteroid, which are the space rocks known as Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) having the perihelion distances (closest distance to the sun) less than 1.017 AU. They usually have sizes less than 10 km and form the majority of the population of Earth-crossing and Potentially Hazardous asteroids. Is this giant Asteroid 2024 JR17 a potential threat to Earth? Know what NASA has revealed.
Asteroid 2024 JR17: Is It Potentially Hazardous?
NASA said that Potentially Hazardous asteroids are the ones which exceed 150 meters (around 492-foot) in diameter and comes within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometres) of Earth. Due to its size, 2024 JR17 isn’t designated as a potentially hazardous asteroid.
However, it is still crucial to keep an eye on these upcoming asteroids as a mere deviation in their orbit can alter the path of the asteroids and make them hurriedly move towards the planets, including Earth.
Do asteroids really deviate from their orbit? Yes, they do! One of the recently known examples is the NASA DART spacecraft which successfully impacted the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022. However, it was a human-directed impact in order to test if we can keep our Earth safe in future from the upcoming threat of asteroids.
Similarly, an asteroid moving in a safe path can be altered from its path due to some external factors. Hence, it is crucial to keep an eye on these nasty asteroids. Hence, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies gathers data from various observatories including Pan-STARRS, the Catalina Sky Survey, and NASA’s NEOWISE, and alerts people about the upcoming space rocks.
