Massive Asteroid To Whizz By Earth Today, But There’s No Danger Of Impact

Massive Asteroid To Whizz By Earth Today, But There’s No Danger Of Impact

A massive asteroid, as giant as a skyscraper, known as 2019 GT3, will whizz by Earth today. Even though the space rock will pass by Earth at 30,500 miles per hour, and it is cataloged as a ‘close approach,’ there is no danger of impact.

Massive Asteroid To Whizz By Earth Today

The asteroid will pass at around 4.6 million miles away from our planet, so it’s going to fly next to us at a safe distance. The space rock measures a diameter of 1,247 feet, and if it were to collide with the Earth, it would not burn in the atmosphere so that it would have caused massive damage to life on Earth.

The 2019 GT3 massive asteroid is known as ‘potentially hazardous asteroid’ (PHA). Astronomers use that category to represent those Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that could make ‘close approaches’ that might be threatening, as per NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).

The ‘close approach’ of the 2019 GT3 space rock happens a few weeks after the killer asteroid 2019 OK whizz by Earth without being detected by astronomers until hours before the event took place.

Planetary Defense Against Possible Massive Asteroid Impacts

Lately, scarry news emerged on the Internet talking about massive space rocks that could bring the End of the Days. Even Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and CEO, warned us that we don’t have a reliable planetary defense system to protect us against massive asteroid impacts.

However, both NASA and ESA are working hard to learn more about asteroids. Their goal is to come up with methods to deflect a space rock’s trajectory in case it heads towards Earth.

To do that, NASA and ESA prepared two consecutive missions to the binary asteroid Didymos. Both tasks will have the purpose to study the system of space rocks and find reliable ways to deflect their trajectory.

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