Asteroid twice the size of Burj Khalifa to fly past Earth on January 18
- In Current Affairs
- 01:02 AM, Jan 19, 2022
- Myind Staff
A huge asteroid bigger than the size of Burj Khalifa is set to fly past Earth on January 18, NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) revealed.
According to the NASA, the asteroid 7482 is about 1.6 km wide. It has been characterised by US space agency, as a “potentially hazardous object” due to its relative proximity to the Earth while shooting past.
The asteroid will flyby at a speed of 69,200 kilometres per hour. Even though it has been classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid, NASA has stated that it will pass at a safe distance of over 1.9 million kilometres from our planet, which is five times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
According to NASA, the closest approach of the asteroid, which is also going by the name 1994 PC1, will occur at 4:51pm EST on January 18 and 3:21am IST on January 19.
The asteroid will only be spotted through a telescope owing to such a huge distance. Interestingly, this space rock orbits the Sun every 1.5 years and won't come close to Earth until 2051.
Meanwhile, issuing a warning about deadly asteroids, researchers from the University of Hawaii at M'noa have said asteroids may show up out of nowhere owing to a recently identified anomaly.
Funded by NASA, experts revealed that the Earth's rotation creates a blind spot, owing to which even if an asteroid is spotted, it seems as if it is not moving.
The most recent asteroid to hit the planet was eight years ago in Russia which exploded in the atmosphere.
Recently, Nasa launched a mission to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid as a test run to stop a giant space rock from wiping out life on Earth. The spacecraft is expected to hit the asteroid in the fall of 2022, when the binary asteroid system of Dimorphos and Didymos is 11 million kilometres from Earth.
Image credit: Getty images
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