Science

NASA asteroid SHOCK: An asteroid just shot past Earth closer than the Moon at 26,000MPH


The , dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2019 KT, zipped by in the wee morning hours around 4.48am BST on May 28 (3.48am UTC). NASA’s asteroid trackers at the California Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have kept a watchful eye on the space rock for the two days leading to the flyby. The asteroid was first observed barrelling towards the Earth on Sunday, May 26. And when the asteroid finally approached our planet today, it scraped by much closer than the Moon.

Asteroid KT is an Apollo-type space rock on an orbital trajectory similar to that of Asteroid 1862 Apollo.

The space rock skimmed the Earth today on a so-called “Earth Close Approach” but thankfully did not strike.

explained: “You may have heard about an asteroid or comet making a ‘close approach’ to Earth.

“That happens when the object in its natural orbit about the Sun passes particularly close to Earth.

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“There’s no firm rule on what counts as ‘close’ but it’s not at all uncommon for small asteroids to pass closer to Earth than our own Moon.

“That might seem too close for comfort but remember that the Moon orbits Earth about 239,000 miles (385,000km) away.”

So, just how close did Asteroid KT come to the Earth today?

At its closest, NASA estimates the rock approached us from a distance of about 0.00217 astronomical units (au).

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One astronomical unit describes the distance from the Earth to the Sun or about 93 million miles (149.6 million km).

Asteroid KT trimmed this distance down to a “nominal distance” of just 201,714 miles (324,627km).

According to NASA, this is the equivalent of 0.85 Lunar Distances (LD) or 85 percent of the distance to the Moon.

NASA said: “If you represented Earth by a basketball in a scale model, the Moon would be the size of a tennis ball and about 21ft (seven metres) away – the distance between the two posts of a professional soccer goal.

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“At this scale, a 100m-wide (328ft-wide) asteroid would be much smaller than a grain of sand, even smaller than a speck of dust.”

NASA’s JPL estimates Asteroid KT measures somewhere in the range of 42.6ft to 95.1ft (13m to 29m) in diameter.

At the upper end of NASA’s size estimate, the asteroid is comparable in size to about 14 Queen Size beds.

After today’s flyby, the asteroid is not expected to approach the Earth again but will instead fly close to the Gas Giant Jupiter on April 13, 2025.



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