An Asteroid the Size of a House Will Fly by Earth Today

An Asteroid the Size of a House Will Fly by Earth Today

A newly-discovered asteroid is projected to fly safely by Earth on Wednesday.
Discovered April 11, Asteroid 2020 GH2 is anywhere from 43 to 70 feet wide or about the size of a single-family house, The asteroid is projected to pass by Earth at a distance of 220,000 miles, which puts it about 16,000 miles closer than the moon.
It poses no threat of danger to the Earth.
To understand the scale of those distances, a member of NASA’s Planetary Defense Group  using a basketball to represent the Earth and a tennis ball to represent the moon. At that scale, the two bodies would be located 25 feet apart. And an object like an asteroid would be less than the size of a grain of salt (which is even too large a scale model).
An asteroid flyby would only be worrying at a distance where it could hit weather satellites, which are located about 22,000 miles away from Earth.
The asteroid was discovered by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona, a project funded by NASA’s Near Earth Object Observation Program (NEOO). After its discovery, Italy’s Virtual Telescope Project captured an image of the asteroid in movement. “This is an incredible capture, as the hardware tracked this moving target to perfection for a long time,"  on Tuesday.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon

Image
You may soon be able to ride to the edge of space from Alaska in a Balloon Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune A company wants to use an advanced balloon to fly customers from Earth’s surface in Alaska to the highest reaches of the planet’s atmosphere. Florida-based startup firm Space Perspective plans to use the Pacific Spaceport Complex in Kodiak to serve as one of the launch sites for the vehicle, called the Spaceship Neptune,  The Anchorage Daily News  reported on Sunday. The balloon rides will be manned by a flight crew taking eight passengers in a pressurized capsule suspended beneath a hydrogen balloon the size of a football stadium. Each passenger could pay an estimated $125,000 for a six-hour journey. Mark Lester, CEO of Alaska Aerospace Corp., said the high-altitude rides will be available from Kodiak in a few years and will ...
Read more

Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies

Image
Committee recommends review of planetary protection policies WASHINGTON — The NASA Advisory Council has recommended that NASA review its existing planetary protection guidelines to balance the needs of science and exploration, an effort that could set the stage for a similar revision at the international level. The council, during a two-day meeting at NASA Headquarters Dec. 10–11, adopted a recommendation calling on NASA to establish an interdisciplinary committee of experts to review the agency’s current requirements for preventing contamination of other worlds by NASA spacecraft as well as any contamination of the Earth by materials brought back from those worlds. “NASA should establish a multidisciplinary task force of experts from industry, the scientific community, and relevant government agencies, to develop U.S. policies that properly balance the legitimate need to protect against the harmful contamination of the Earth or other celestial bodies with the scientific, social, and e...
Read more

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought

Surprise! There's more water on Jupiter than anyone thought Jupiter  appears to have more water than anyone expected. Newly released data from  NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested. The surprise result has scientists delving deep again into results from  NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter , which obtained drier results in 1995 when engineers deliberately threw the spacecraft into Jupiter's atmosphere. (Galileo was low on fuel and NASA didn't want to take the chance, even if it was a slight one, of the spacecraft accidentally crashing on a potentially habitable icy moon.) Reconciling the results from Galileo and Juno is key for sc...
Read more