NASA estimates that what we learned in the movie ‘Armageddon’ – that an asteroid could destroy civilization – should only happen once every few million years. However, the agency is always on the lookout for possible proximity of these relatively small rocky bodies. And recently it discovered one that passed relatively close to our planet.
Asteroid in sight. On June 16, the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) center in Sutherland, South Africa, discovered a new asteroid. It called it 2024 MK, and revealed that it was about the size of a football stadium. This weekend it passed 290,000 km from Earth and The Virtual Telescope Project tracked it, but some lucky people were also able to spot it with the naked eye or with small telescopes.
A worrying sizeIn 2013, the Chelyabinsk superbolide crashed in Siberia, and despite having a diameter of about 18 metres, its entry into the atmosphere released the energy equivalent to 30 Hiroshima bombs. The 2024 MK had a diameter of between 150 and 240 metres, and had it collided, the explosion would have been between 10 and 20 times that of most hydrogen bombs created.
It wouldn’t destroy the Earth, but its impact would be terrible.Experts such as John Brown of Western University in Canada have said the impact could be close to a gigaton in magnitude. He said if this asteroid had hit the US East Coast, it would have had “catastrophic effects on most of the eastern seaboard.” Still, he said, it was not big enough to “affect the entire world.”
Two worse than one. Just recently, a second asteroid has come relatively close to our planet. It was 2011 UL21, which came particularly close last Thursday and was about the size of Mount Everest. With a diameter of about 2.5 km, the asteroid was roughly a quarter of the size of the one that hit Earth 65 million years ago. Fortunately, it passed even further away than 2024 MK — 6.5 million km separated us from it when it “came close” — and there was no chance of it colliding with our planet.
No ‘Armageddon’ for (at least) 1,000 years. It is certainly necessary to keep an eye on these asteroids, but the probability of them causing us problems is very low. A recent study indicated that the possibility of asteroids with a diameter of around a kilometer is very low. According to Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz of the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the authors of the study, “as far as we know, there will be no impacts in the next 1,000 years.”
But the “little ones” continue to worryHowever, NASA is monitoring a large number of other potentially lethal asteroids that could destroy entire cities if they collide. The space agency has been compiling a “map” of these asteroids for years, but 60% of these potentially dangerous asteroids have not yet been detected.
Image | NASA
At WorldOfSoftware | 7,000 years ago, a meteorite fell in Siberia that escapes our understanding. The only certainty is that it is not natural