Giant Asteroid to Cross Earth

On Tuesday evening, an asteroid the size of a small house whizzed near Earth. According to NASA’s Center for Near- Object Studies, the space rock came within 79,000 miles of Earth, or approximately one-third of the distance between the moon and Earth. According to CNEOS, it was named 2022 GN1 and measured 24.3 to 55.8 feet in length and traveled at 34,695 miles per hour.

According to Mike Hankey, operations manager of the American Meteor Society, GN1 is about the same size as the Chelyabinsk Meteor, 59 feet long. According to Hankey, the asteroid exploded in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, causing a sonic boom that injured over 1,000 people. GN1 caused little risk to people, unlike Chelyabinsk, according to Gianluca Masi, the Virtual Telescope Project’s creator, and scientific director.

There is nearly always a chance that an asteroid will collide with Earth. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office keeps an eye on things in orbit that could endanger the planet. The DART mission, or NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, is one of the organization’s most recent projects.

According to the agency, NASA is studying if contacting an asteroid will change its direction and speed, which might be used to asteroids that pose a threat to Earth in the future. The spacecraft took off from Vandenburg Space Force Base in California on November 23 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.Its target is the Didymos asteroid system, which consists of Didymos, a big asteroid, and Dimorphos, a smaller asteroid orbiting around it. According to NASA, the goal is to impact the smaller asteroid, which will reduce the time it takes Dimorphos to orbit Didymos by a few minutes.