2020 was basically a disaster movie and 2021 does not look much better. As if that were not dystopian enough, there is now a gin-like asteroid that will soon pass uncomfortably close, uncomfortably.
Asteroid 2001 FO32 will zoom past Earth on March 21 – but wait. There is still no reason to start preparing for Judgment Day, although it is large enough and close enough to be classified by NASA as a potentially dangerous asteroid (PHA). 2001 FO32 initially sounds like fuel. The space rock, whose orbit intersects with the earth, will be the largest and fastest asteroid surpassing our home field in 2021. This thing is about as wide as the length of the Golden Gate Bridge and will fly almost 77,000 km / h. . It’s 21 miles per second.
Wait a moment before storing toothpaste and dish soap in your basement. NASA is positive 2001 FO32 will not hit us, despite the narrow classification given by the asteroid. They know something there, because they have been watching the object since 2001 (it can take years and even decades to confirm where something is and where it is going in outer space). The qualifications for a potentially dangerous asteroid make FO32 of 2001 sound much more nerve-wracking than it actually is. But first, before anything is officially considered dangerous, it must qualify as a Near-Earth Object (NEO).
Asteroids and comets often end up as NEOs when gravity from other planets pushes them close to Earth. Most will never again be a dinosaur extinction waiting to happen. At some point in its orbit, an object must enter the danger zone of less than 1.3 times the distance from the earth to the sun to be seen as a NEO. The earth is 93 million miles from the sun, so whatever it is, at some point during its orbit must be nearly 121 million miles from the earth to transition from just another object to NEO status.
Asteroids and other NEOs must be about 500 feet long and sneak within 4.6 million miles of Earth, as they orbit potentially dangerous asteroids, or if the threat is a comet, potentially dangerous objects. We have one thing the dinosaurs did not do before the Chixculub asteroid hit Earth. NASA and other space agencies are developing asteroid diversion techniques. Finding out exactly how big a dangerous NEO is, along with its shape, mass, structure, and chemical composition, helps scientists figure out the best way to bend it.
NASA’s DART mission, which will be launched in July, will experiment on harmless asteroid Didymus, which is 11 million kilometers away. There will be one spacecraft crashing into Didymus and moving it out of the way, shifting the orbit of its lunar “Didymoon”, and another to depict the whole thing as it goes on.
FO32’s orbit in 2001 has been studied long enough so that NASA can be sure that it will not face our planet. It is in a highly elliptical orbit around the sun and passes our star every 810 days, so a year on this asteroid is a little more than twice as much as it is here. Its size is determined by how bright it looks, depending on the way it reflects light. It can be larger than 97% of the asteroids, but remember that many asteroids and meteorites are small enough to burn up or at least break up in the atmosphere when they reach Earth.
Even at a size that would make the Golden Gate Bridge tremble, it is still nothing compared to the very large asteroids lurking in the dark. We do not even have to worry about any of it for the next hundred years.