South Africa: Bus-sized asteroid to whizz pass Earth this weekend By News24
The object, dubbed 2019 GF1, is between 8m and 18m long and will come as close as 1.8 million kilometres from the planet, data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed.
For a typical object, it’s travelling relatively slowly at 1.91km/s – about five times the speed of sound – according to JPL. “It’s moving across the sky very slowly because it’s orbiting the Sun at a similar rate to the Earth,” South African Astronomical Observatory Science Engagement Astronomer Dr Daniel Cunnama told News24.Asteroid 2019 GC6 was only discovered nine days before its fly-by, reports Space.com, and is a massive 30m wide.Asteroids usually orbit a belt between Mars and Jupiter, as well as beyond Neptune in a region known as the Kuiper Belt.
2019 GF1 could be classified as an Apollo asteroid because it crosses the Earth’s orbit, according to JPL data.According to Spaceweather.com, there are about 1 967 potentially hazardous NEOs and scientists continue to discover new ones. The SAAO hosts an Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System instrument in Sutherland to monitor for hazardous asteroids.The instrument is funded by NASA and costs $3.8m.
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