Good News: Deadly Asteroid is Not Going to Hit Earth
A deadly asteroid
A new Phys.org report released on February 25 could have been the plot of 2021’s “Don’t Look Up,” a Netflix original about a potentially deadly asteroid that threatens to strike Earth. However, the good news is it was simply a close call.
According to the website, the first observations of an asteroid called 2022 AE1 revealed a potential impact with Earth in July of 2023. However, the threat has now been decreased to virtually zero, and the asteroid has actually been eliminated from the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) risk list.
” In January this year, we familiarized an asteroid with the greatest ranking on the Palermo scale that we have seen in over a decade. In my practically ten years at ESA, I have actually never seen such a risky object,” claimed Marco Micheli, an astronomer at ESA’s NEOCC. “It was a thrill to track 2022 AE1 and refine its trajectory till we had sufficient data to say for sure, this asteroid will certainly not strike.”
Close Calls
While we could not describe tracking that asteroid as a thrill, it is absolutely a relief to realize it will not strike our home planet. The Palermo scale classifies and prioritizes risks of near-Earth objects (NEOs) by merging the possible date of impact, the strike’s energy, and impact likelihood. Most asteroids burn up upon entry into Earth’s atmosphere. However, some do sometimes present a small risk.
It is a little scary to consider gigantic space rocks crashing into the Earth. Yet, we can relax knowing that the NEOCC’s Asteroid Orbit Determination (AstOD) automated system flagged asteroid 2022 AE1 simply one day after its detection. Daily, the system calculates asteroid orbits and scores them with the Palermo scale, promptly posting the results on the NEOCC website.
Forget the Avengers– we have actually got the NEOCC!
Read the original article on The Byte.
