A lot of astronomers believe that it’s only a matter of time until a huge asteroid capable of wiping out the entire human race will approach our planet. We all know what happened with the dinosaurs roughly 60 million years ago. A similar scenario will likely repeat itself one day, but let’s hope that humanity will be advanced enough technologically to be able to deal with the situation.
Luckily, it won’t happen the same with the potentially hazardous asteroid known as 2021 NY1. NASA classified it likewise, and the space rock is hurtling towards our planet at the huge speed of 21,000 mph, according to TweakTown.com.
2021 NY1 will come close to Earth this month
Although the 2021 NY1 asteroid would surely produce some damage if it hits, it won’t be the case. The space rock will approach Earth, but it won’t get in a collision with it.
The asteroid measures somewhere between 427 and 984 feet in its diameter. The space object will come within 930,487 miles of Earth, meaning very close in terms of astronomical scaling.
NASA’s official NEO website writes:
Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The scientific interest in comets and asteroids is due largely to their status as the relatively unchanged remnant debris from the solar system formation process some 4.6 billion years ago.
According to the European Space Agency, Near-Earth objects (aka NEOs) are comets and asteroids of sizes that range from meters to tens of kilometers that fly around the Sun and whose orbits are close to that of Earth’s.
