The largest asteroid that visited the earth this year was magnified by our planet today (March 21) and it is a true demon.
The 2001 asteroid FO32 washes at an extremely fast speed through space for a space rock, about 124,000 km / h, and will pass, according to NASA, with a safe range of 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers). . It will only come so close to earth again in 2052.
Asteroid 2001 FO32 is up to 630 meters wide and poses no impact risk to Earth, but the speed is peculiar, the agency said.
“The reason for the asteroid’s extremely fast close approach is the highly inclined and elongated (or eccentric) orbit around the sun, an orbit tilted 39 degrees to the Earth’s orbit,” NASA officials wrote in a statement. . “This orbit takes the asteroid closer to the sun than Mercury and twice as far from the sun as Mars.”
Astrophysicist Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project in Ceccano, Italy, spotted the 2001 asteroid FO32 with a telescope in the days before today’s flight. His video and images show the asteroid as a bright moving object in the sky.
Video: Watch asteroid 2001 FO32 move across the night sky
Like a rock rolling down a hill, the asteroid 2001 FO32 picks up speed as it falls inward toward the sun and then slows down as it looks out toward Mars again. The asteroid takes more than two years (to be exactly 810 days) to complete one orbit and will not pose an impact risk to Earth for centuries, despite the classification of FO32 as a ‘potentially dangerous asteroid’, said NASA.
“We know the orbit of 2001 FO32 around the sun very accurately, as it was discovered 20 years ago and has been followed ever since,” said Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), which oversees NASA’s Jet , said. Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. “There is no chance that the asteroid will come closer to Earth than 1.25 million miles.”
NASA and astronomers around the world regularly search and track asteroids that could pose an impact hazard to Earth. Asteroid 2001 F032 was first spotted in 2001 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program in Socorro, New Mexico. Observations by NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope indicate that the asteroid is between 440 and 680 m wide.
“Even if it is at the smaller end of the scale, FO32 2001 will still be the largest asteroid to hit near our planet in 2021,” NASA officials wrote. “The last notable major asteroid approach was that of OR2 in 1998 on April 29, 2020. Although 2001 FO32 is slightly smaller than OR2 of 1998, it will be three times closer to Earth.”
The asteroid 2001 FO32 will be at the nearest point of the earth today about 5.25 times the distance between the earth and the moon. Astronomers will closely monitor the asteroid with telescopes to learn more about its size, brightness and composition.
“We are trying to do geology with a telescope,” Vishnu Reddy, an associate professor at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson, said in the statement.
For the past few days, astronomers have been using NASA’s infrared telescope facility above Mauna Kea in Hawaii to determine its chemical composition. They can also use NASA’s Deep Space Network of radio dishes to reflect signals from asteroid 2001 FO32 to measure its orbit, how fast it rotates and even determine some surface features such as craters.
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“Observations dating back 20 years have revealed that approximately 15% of the asteroids near Earth that are comparable to the FO32 2001 have a small moon,” said Lance Benner, chief scientist at JPL, in the statement. “Currently little is known about this object, so the very close encounter provides an excellent opportunity to learn a lot about this asteroid.”
The asteroid may also be visible to amateur astronomers in the Southern Hemisphere as it travels through the earth, but it can be a challenge to locate.
“The asteroid will be the brightest as it moves through the southern sky,” Chodas said. ‘Amateur astronomers in the southern hemisphere and low northern latitudes should be able to see this asteroid using moderate telescopes with diaphragms at least 8 centimeters in the nights that follow the closest approach, but they will probably need star charts to do so. to find. “
Asteroid 2001 FO32 is actually one of the two asteroids passing through Earth today, according to NASA’s Asteroid Watch website which contains such flights. The second asteroid, named 2021 FH1, is about 30 meters wide and will pass the Earth at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers. It was first spotted on Friday (March 19) by astronomers.
Email Tariq Malik at [email protected] or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us on @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.