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posted by janrinok on Wednesday September 08 2021, @03:32PM   Printer-friendly

Asteroid Traveling Through Space at 21,000 MPH Classified As Potentially Hazardous, Will Pass Earth This Month:

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


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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday September 09 2021, @02:10AM (3 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Thursday September 09 2021, @02:10AM (#1176070)

    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...

    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 09 2021, @03:55AM (2 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Thursday September 09 2021, @03:55AM (#1176101) Homepage

    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)

      by driverless (4770) on Thursday September 09 2021, @04:11AM (#1176107)

      Sorry, I'm running OpenBSD, everything's a bit different there.

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 09 2021, @04:29AM

        by Reziac (2489) on Thursday September 09 2021, @04:29AM (#1176109) Homepage

        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.