Mohamed Ismail – Cairo – NASA published new images of an asteroid that passed very quickly near Earth this week, and is called the Snowman Asteroid because of its strange shape.
The asteroid, called 2024 ON, safely passed our planet at a distance of 1 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) — roughly 2.6 times the distance between the Moon and Earth — on Tuesday (September 17). It was traveling at speeds approaching 32,000 kilometers per hour, or about 26 times the speed of sound.
The new images were taken by the Goldstone Solar System Radar in California on September 16. The images show that the skyscraper-sized asteroid is actually two asteroids that have become bound by their own gravity in a formation known as a contact binary after they came very close to each other.
“This asteroid is classified as potentially hazardous, but it does not pose a threat to Earth in the foreseeable future,” NASA wrote in a statement. “Goldstone’s measurements have allowed scientists to significantly reduce the uncertainty in the asteroid’s distance from Earth and its future motion for many decades.”
NASA considers any space object that comes within 7.5 million kilometers (4.7 million miles) of our planet to be a “potential hazard,” even if it doesn’t pose a direct threat to Earth. That’s because even slight jolts in the path of such an asteroid—for example, by colliding with another asteroid—could send it on a collision course with Earth.
NASA tracks the locations and orbits of nearly 28,000 asteroids by scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours. It has estimated the trajectories of all of these near-Earth objects after the turn of the century, and found that Earth faces no known risk of a catastrophic asteroid impact for at least 100 years.
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