NASA told Fox News Digital that the rocky object, which has been named 2024 ON, is 350 meters long by 180 meters wide, which roughly equals 1,150 feet by 590 feet.
“An asteroid of this size coming this close to Earth only happens every five to ten years,” Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told the media. The asteroid is said to be the size of a stadium. As per the expert, the last time the Earth was hit by such a massive asteroid was in Russia in the year 2013.
Can this asteroid destroy the Earth?
“We actually check [about the possibility of collision], not just for the immediate future, but also for the next hundred years,” Farnocchia explained to the media. “And there is no possibility of collision in the next hundred years.”
“The dashboard displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon); an object larger than about 150 meters that can approach the Earth to within this distance is termed a potentially hazardous object,” the expert said.
The asteroid that killed dinosaurs was between 10 and 15 kilometres wide and they created a crater of size 150 kilometre in diameter.
As on Tuesday morning, the 2024 ON was traveling at around 8.8 kilometers per second.
How are asteroids formed?
Asteroids are formed from the leftover material of the early solar system, about 4.6 billion years ago. During the formation of planets, dust and gas particles in the solar nebula collided and clumped together, forming larger bodies called planetesimals. While some of these planetesimals merged to create planets, others remained small and became asteroids. Most asteroids are found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where Jupiter’s strong gravity prevented them from coalescing into a planet. These rocky bodies are remnants of the early solar system and provide insight into its formation and evolution.
How many asteroids have been disastrous to our planet?
Several devastating asteroid collisions occurred throughout Earth’s geological history. One of the most sensational events is the Chicxulub impact, which happened about 66 million years ago and caused the extinction of dinosaurs. It killed nearly 75% of Earth’s biological species. This gigantic asteroid is estimated to be around 10 km in size; it led to enormous wildfires and generated tsunamis. Its particles caused a “nuclear winter” as they spread into the atmospheric levels.
Other smaller effects have occurred: such as the Tunguska event of 1908, that flattened 2,000 kilometers of Siberian forest. Big, earth-altering impacts are relatively rare in Earth’s geological history, though.
