According to NASA’s asteroid tracker, an asteroid almost 2.5x the size of a dinosaur is due to fly by Earth today.
Which Asteroid Is It?
The asteroid has been designated as 2022 PW. It is scheduled to fly by today at a speed of 7.47 kilometers per second, which is roughly 22 times the speed of sound.
How Close Will It Be?
The asteroid will be passing Earth at a distance of about 529,000 km. For reference, the moon orbits the Earth at a distance of about 384,000 km. So 2022 PW will pass the earth a little farther out than the moon, but not by much.
How Big Is It?
Compared to other asteroids, this one isn’t actually that big. The estimated diameter is around 51 meters.
Are Any Other Asteroids Supposed to Hit Earth in 2022?
It is unclear whether or not there are any potential asteroid strikes in our future. It is true that asteroids are one of the most dangerous threats to our planet, given their scope of destruction and the fact that we have yet to develop proper defenses against them.
According to research done at the Davidson Institute of Science, an asteroid that is 140 meters in diameter would release an amount of energy 1000 times greater than that of the first atomic bomb.
Something like the Apophis Asteroid (300 meters in diameter) could destroy an entire continent.
So while 2022 PW is measured against the size of the dinosaurs, it doesn’t even come close to the size of the asteroid that actually took out the dinosaurs.
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