UNITED STATES: NASA recorded a massive asteroid passing Earth at an incredible 13 kilometers per second (46,800 Kilometers per hour) on Thursday.
The cosmic object, designated Asteroid 2022 UF4, came within 4.5 million kilometres of our planet when it made its closest approach. It was approximately the width of an airplane at 140 feet.
Asteroid 2022 UF4 was found on September 25, 2022, and it is a member of the Apollo asteroid group.
It completes one circle around the Sun every 376 days, traveling as far as 213 million kilometres from the Sun’s surface and as close as 92 million kilometres.
On October 28, 2055, asteroid 2022 UF4 will make its next near encounter with Earth. According to data, it will be 8.23 million kilometres away from Earth on that day.
This happened over a month after a NASA spacecraft hit an asteroid that was seven million miles from Earth to change its orbit.
In a controlled collision, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) struck the asteroid Dimorphos while travelling at 22,500 kilometres per hour.
The trial was the first-ever planetary defence test conducted in space. The Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope simultaneously examined the same celestial target for the first time, according to NASA.
The project’s objective was to determine whether a spacecraft might nudge an asteroid just far enough off course to spare our planet by changing its trajectory simply with kinetic force.
Now that the test has been successful, it’s feasible that NASA or another space agency would send a spacecraft to ram the dangerous asteroid in the same way that DART did.
Also Read: Shockwaves from Meteoroid Impact Detected by NASA’s InSight Lander
