‘Potentially Hazardous’ asteroid detected just 7 hours before whizzing past Earth
The newest asteroid to fly by Earth is Asteroid 2018 BD, which passed our planet at a distance of approximately 22,000 miles at 7:43 AM PST on Thursday. That was just seven hours after the asteroid was discovered by astronomers.
Asteroid 2018 BD may have been just too small to be noticed ahead of time. But as CNET rightly points out, 2018 BD may be close enough to do some actual damage to objects orbiting Earth right now like satellites. Such an event could trigger a massive space event where space junk resulting from the impact could destroy even more satellites, though incidents like this are for the most part unlikely.
As for actually crashing into Earth, 2018 BD was probably far too small for that. Instead, it would just burn up while passing through Earth’s atmosphere.
Meanwhile, Asteroid 2002 AJ129, which at about 1 km wide, is wider than the tallest building in the US (New York’s One World Trade Centre), stacked on top of itself — is predicted to fly close to our planet in early February.
Asteroid 2002 AJ129 will fly at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour just 2.6 million miles from Earth.
“This is a fairly routine close approach of an object that we have known about for many years,” said Paul Chodas who manages the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Asteroid 2002 AJ192 was discovered in 2002.
Under NASA’s classifications, any asteroid or comet predicted to travel anywhere within 0.05 Astronomical Units (or reaching under 5 million miles) of Earth’s orbit and that has a size of at least 30 meters or more is deemed “potentially hazardous.”
