Asteroid 2021 EQ3 will pass closer than the moon.
NASA / JPL-Caltech
A particularly large asteroid will pass near the earth especially on Monday night, and the encounter will be broadcast live online. Do not worry: the fly will be completely safe and pose no danger to anything or anyone on earth or any of our satellites. But asteroid 2021 EQ3 will come closer to Earth than our lone natural satellite.
Sky surveys and other telescopes, on average, see a space rock closer than the moon past every few days. Most of these asteroids are only a few meters wide, which probably does not make them bigger than a bus.
However, Asteroid 2021 EQ3 can have a diameter of up to 38 meters, which looks more like a small apartment building. It is also about the same size as the meteoroid struck in the atmosphere above Russia in 2013, which created a shock wave that blew out thousands of windows in the city of Chelyabinsk below and injured hundreds.
2021, EQ3 will pass the nearest above us at about 21:45 PT Monday night at a distance of about 173,000 miles (278,000 km) – that is 72% of the distance from the earth to the moon.
You may have headlines about a #asteroid which will fly safely through the earth on March 21st. Although this asteroid, known as 2001 FO32, is large, it will zip safely past Earth at a distance of 1.3 million miles – five times farther than the moon – and it poses no danger of hitting Earth. pic.twitter.com/oZZG5UaFsf
– NASA Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) March 8, 2021
This makes 2021 EQ3 the second largest object approaching the moon in 2021.
It is also different from 2001 FO32, which is an absolute monster with a diameter of about a kilometer. The asteroid will pass on March 21, but five times farther than the moon at a distance.
The size of the asteroid also makes it a great object to detect, and the Virtual Telescope project in Rome will stream an online viewing party via its website.
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