2023-07-25 16:00:00
An asteroid passed close to our planet without being spotted. How is that still possible?
An asteroid the size of a 15-storey building passed very close to Earth without anyone noticing. baptized 2023 NT1this pebble of 60 meters in diameter was spotted Two days after that his trajectory led him to 96,500 km from our planetwhich is considered quite close by astronomers, reports Forbes. This is the equivalent of a little more than a quarter of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
The Sun hid its trajectory
How this fault in the asteroid detection and protection system could it have occurred? In fact, he was hidden by light simply the sun. The meteor approached us in full dayand thus relatively often, asteroids pass not far from us without our noticing. “Hidden in the glare of our Sun are an unknown number of asteroids that are on trajectories that we cannot follow,” explained the European Space Agency. These asteroids “invisible” are expected to be detected by a special ESA mission, called NEOMIR, by 2030.
Newly-discovered #asteroid 2023 NT1 passed about 1/4 the Moon’s distance on July 13, but wasn’t discovered until July 15, as it approached Earth in the daytime sky. It may be as large as 60 meters across, possibly larger than the asteroid that caused Meteor Crater in Arizona. pic.twitter.com/VLXB4ChTMJ
— Tony Dunn (@tony873004) July 16, 2023
As astronomer Tony Dunn recalled on Twitter (or X, as Elon Musk just renamed it), our planet once experienced an impact from a slightly smaller asteroid 50,000 years ago on what is now Arizona. A trace of the shock, which may have been similar to a nuclear explosion, is still visible at Meteo Crater, north of the city of Phoenix.
In any case, this event is far from rare, since there could be a million asteroids located in direct proximity to the Earth, with a width of between 30 and 100 meters. Each week, some circulating within 100,000 km of the planet are identified, but this one would be by far the largest seen in 2023.
In 2013, a car three times smaller and which had not been spotted crashed near the Russian city of Chelyabinsksending a shock wave that caused significant material damage and injured hundreds.
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#buildingsized #asteroid #passed #close #Earth