No giant gauze pad needed for (2022 YO1)’s near miss.
A comet with a nucleus larger than the state of Rhode Island is heading our way, but Earth is in no danger of a “Don’t Look Up” situation, astronomers say.
While most of the known comet nuclei measure a few miles across, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted Comet C/2014 UN271 with a nucleus that reaches 85 miles across. That’s more than twice the width of Rhode Island.
This nucleus is about 50 times larger than those of other comets, and it has an estimated mass of 500 trillion tons, which is 100,000 times greater than the mass of a typical comet.
The comet is moving at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of our solar system and will make its closest approach to us in 2031. But it will never get closer than one billion miles away from the sun – just a little farther than the distance between Earth and Saturn.
www.cnn.com/...
While it's unlikely that a giant space meteor will hit Earth in the near future, there are some asteroids that could potentially impact our planet:
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Bennu
This asteroid has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2182. Bennu is about a third of a mile wide, and if it were to hit, it could cause an impact that releases the energy of 24 nuclear weapons. NASA is preparing for this potential impact and has made contact with Bennu multiple times since its discovery in 1999.
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Apophis
This asteroid will pass close to Earth multiple times over the next 30 years. Blue Origin, a private space company, plans to send a spacecraft to meet Apophis three months before its flyby.
NASA conducts hypothetical asteroid impact exercises every two years to prepare for the possibility of an impact. The exercises help decision-makers and experts practice responding to an impact scenario. NASA has also demonstrated the ability to deflect an asteroid's trajectory with its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.
Major impacts can have significant consequences for Earth, including mass extinctions, the formation of the Earth-Moon system, and the origin of water on Earth.
Apophis quickly gained notoriety as an asteroid that could pose a serious threat to Earth when astronomers predicted that it would come uncomfortably close in 2029. Thanks to additional observations of Apophis, the risk of an impact in 2029 was later ruled out, as was the potential impact risk posed by another close approach in 2036. Until March 2021, however, a small chance of impact in 2068 still remained.
When Apophis made a distant flyby of Earth around March 5, 2021, astronomers took the opportunity to use powerful radar observations to refine the estimate of its orbit around the Sun with extreme precision, enabling them to confidently rule out any impact risk in 2068 and long after.
science.nasa.gov/...
