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Somewhere out there amongst the stars is 2021 NY1, another asteroid actively hurtling towards Earth at insane speeds. While it's on track to pass the planet, it's still close enough for NASA to classify it as a potentially hazardous "Near-Earth Object" (NEO), allowing the outfit to keep an extra eye on its future trajectory.
As of now, experts believe 2021 NY1 is moving through space at nearly 21,000 miles per hour despite its size, somewhere between 427 and 984 feet wide. The asteroid is expected to pass Earth on September 22nd with its closest point coming within 930,487 miles of the planet. While that may seem like a significant amount, NASA defines NEOs as "an asteroid or comet that approaches our planet less than 1.3 times the distance from Earth to the Sun[*]."
In comparison, from Earth to the moon is roughly 240,000 miles, hence the NEO status.
"Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood," NASA's official NEO website says of the cosmic objects. "Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, comets originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most of the rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The scientific interest in comets and asteroids is due largely to their status as the relatively unchanged remnant debris from the solar system formation process some 4.6 billion years ago."
[*] 1 AU is the average distance of the Earth to the Sun. So 1.3 AU would be ~120 million miles (195 million kilometers).
Also at Gadgets 360
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @03:53PM (7 children)
Don't do that... don't give me hope.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday September 08 2021, @04:21PM (6 children)
If they think a school bus is that size, who knows how far out the numbers might be!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @04:37PM (5 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:40PM (4 children)
A parsec is a unit of distance, not velocity, despite Star Wars.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:44PM (3 children)
Sigh. Was hoping my subject line made it clear that was intentional. My fault, tho, I didn’t achieve funny.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday September 08 2021, @08:32PM (2 children)
Sir, I've been trying to tell you. The humor-space drive is disabled. We can't achieve light lightheartedness.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Wednesday September 08 2021, @08:37PM (1 child)
I knew replacing my dilithium crystals with Folger's crystals would come back to haunt me.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 09 2021, @03:51AM
I find my lack of mod points disturbing, but I still had to clean my monitor. ;)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @04:21PM (7 children)
The Sweet Meteor of Death! It approaches, to bring the cleansing fire to all! Yea, the day of blessing is at hand!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:41PM (1 child)
What Me Worry? I've got my N95 mask.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10 2021, @02:30AM
Jesus, first "it won't block teh virus" now "it'll block an asteroid!"???
Get yer stories straight
(Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:56PM
It's pretty big, but it's not an extinction level event (think Chicxulub 65 million years ago). Oh, it'll cause a huge amount of destruction, but it won't kill all of us.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday September 09 2021, @02:10AM (3 children)
Great, just great. First Trump, then Covid, now a killer asteroid. Now I'm just waiting for the sea to turn into locusts or it to rain firstborn children...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 09 2021, @03:55AM (2 children)
Your plagues have become corrupted. Please reboot your universe and try again.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday September 09 2021, @04:11AM (1 child)
Sorry, I'm running OpenBSD, everything's a bit different there.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 09 2021, @04:29AM
Ah. Your filesystem is incompatible with reality. This causes your plagues to be irregularly expressed. ;)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08 2021, @04:42PM (1 child)
So, is this a real story or someone thinking a Superman story is real?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:02PM
I'm assuming the /irl/ part of the url is for "In Real Life".
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday September 08 2021, @05:26PM (3 children)
The way this usually works is we observe an object and get a few measurements and project its path with a huge cone of uncertainty. Then everyone gets excited, points telescopes at it, we get really good measurements, and find it's unlikely to hit us.
This used to happen a lot. The folks at JPL got tired of doomsday asteroid headlines and split the high certainty & low certainty data sets.
The High certainty impact risk list is Sentry: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/ [nasa.gov]
The Low certainty impact risk list is Scout: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/scout/#/ [nasa.gov]
This object appears on neither list.
Retrieving its data from https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2021%20NY1;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=1#cad [nasa.gov] shows the close approach at 1,500,000 kilometers away. That is super crazy close for a space object, but still very far away, about 3 times farther away than the moon.
On a related note, act now to get your "Giant Meteor 2024" election themed merchandise: https://amzn.to/3hfqcoH [amzn.to] (Amazon Affiliate Link)
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:43PM (2 children)
OTOH, what about its next pass? Or the one after that? It's coming close enough that it needs to be watched, lest some minor twitch to it's orbit shift things a little. (Of course, there's no way to predict major shifts without mapping every possible asteroid collision, but those are a lot less likely.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday September 09 2021, @02:53AM (1 child)
The third link has a chart of upcoming close approaches. Based on current observations, it comes back every 20 years-ish until a 0.2 AU approach in 2105. The caveat to that is that longer time periods increase the possibility of unknown unknowns and increase the size of the uncertainty cone. Part of the Sentry program is they check in on known objects like this one to see if their orbits have changed.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday September 09 2021, @03:00AM
And that's what they should do, so that's good. It's something to be watched, not alarmed about.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday September 08 2021, @07:33PM
There's an asteroid with your name on it!
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday September 09 2021, @12:03AM
>moving through space at nearly 21,000 miles per hour despite its size
Either the author knows nothing about space, or they're being intentionally deceptive for the sake of sensationalism.
I mean yeah, that's pretty fast by normal human standards, but nothing terribly impressive by orbital standards. The Earth (which is just *slightly* larger) is moving around the sun at 67,000mph, as are all the asteroids that share our orbit. So I can only assume this is an asteroid that gets much closer to the sun, and slows way down as it climbs toward us.
It's not even like such a relatively small initial speed will make much a huge difference in the impact force if it hit. Earth's escape velocity is 25,000mph, and that works both ways. If something started at roughly 0 mph relative to the Earth got caught in our gravity and pulled to the surface, it would be going 25,000mph by the time it hit. Even if it started at 21,000mph directly at us, it would only add another 70% to its kinetic energy, raising its impact speed by only about 8,000mph to ~33,000mph.