The space rock known as 2019 US8 is travelling at a whopping 10.6 km per second, or 38,160 km per hour – more than 17 times faster than the Concorde. At that speed, the asteroid could travel from London to New York in slightly more than eight minutes. The asteroid has a diameter of just six metres but will travel within 0.5 lunar distances (LD) of our planet.
One LD is the average distance between the Earth and the Moon, or 384,400 km – so 2019 SU8 will come within 192,000 kilometres of our planet on October 29.
While this may seem like a sizeable distance, it is close enough for NASA to sit up and take notice and class it as a Near Earth Object (NEO) and allow the space agency to study the history of our solar system.
NASA set on its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) website: “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 neighbourhood.
“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.
“The giant outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) formed from an agglomeration of billions of comets and the left over bits and pieces from this formation process are the comets we see today.
“Likewise, today’s asteroids are the bits and pieces left over from the initial agglomeration of the inner planets that include Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.”
While this asteroid poses no threat to Earth, NASA experts have warned that there is a “100 percent” chance an asteroid will hit our world.
Greg Leonard, a senior research specialist at the Catalina Sky Survey – a NASA funded project supported by the Near Earth Object Observation Program (NEOO) under the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) – told Bryan Walsh for the latter’s new book End Times, which looks at the existential threats which humanity faces: “I know that the chances of me dying in an asteroid impact is less than dying from a lightning strike.
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Mr Walsh continued: “As Leonard said, given enough time, a large Near Earth Object will end up on a collision course with our planet.
“It’s happened before and it will happen again.”
