☄️ Three Apollo-class asteroids will be skimming past Earth 🌍 on Christmas day. Read more here 👇 Astronomy Space NEOs
Jay Tate
, the director of the UK’s Spaceguard Center observatory, asteroids “can be disturbed quite easily, so they can develop orbits that cross those of planets”. That’s both good news and bad news. Bad news in the sense that another stray rock could bump into it and put it on a collision course with Earth.
The other side of the coin is that we could potentially divert an asteroid’s path if it came to it. Hopefully…At the time, the space agency tested the Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft by deflecting the orbit of a 160-metre-wide rock known as Dimorphos.However, before we get our hopes up, NASA’s Dart programme scientist, Dr Tom Statler, said NEOs come in “different guises”, so the test results aren’t inclusive.
“We should not be too eager to say one test on one asteroid tells us exactly how every other asteroid would behave in a similar situation,” he said at the time.Even a ‘small’ space rock measuring only 35 metres could easily destroy an entire city. That said, size doesn’t necessarily determine the extent of the damage it could cause.absolute magnitude , which is the measurement if an asteroid was placed 1 Astronomical Unit away, and 1 au from the Sun and at a zero phase angle.
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