NASA reveals that a large asteroid, comparable in size to an aircraft, will come close to Earth today.
NASA has a range of advanced technology equipment that is used to observe and monitor Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) like asteroids and comets. In November, there were many instances of asteroids coming close to Earth, and this trend seems to be continuing in December with another asteroid expected to pass by today, December 11. The asteroid was discovered by NASA’s Defense Coordination Office (PDCO), which is responsible for monitoring the skies and using various telescopes like NEOWISE, ALMA, Pans-STARRS1, and Catalina Sky Survey. Find out more about its close approach.
Asteroid 2010 XF3: Details of the close approach
According to the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), this near-Earth space rock is expected to make its closest approach to the planet at a distance of 7.4 million kilometers. It is moving towards the Earth at a dizzying speed, about 14304 kilometers per hour!
NASA has revealed that Asteroid 2010 XF3 belongs to the Aten group of asteroids, which are Earth-crossing Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with semimajor axes smaller than Earth’s. They are named after the asteroid 2062 Ate, and the first of their kind was discovered by American astronomer Eleanor Helin at the Palomar Observatory on January 7, 1976.
How big is the asteroid?
NASA has not designated a potentially hazardous asteroid. Only celestial bodies larger than 492 feet that pass Earth closer than 7.5 million kilometers are defined as such, and Asteroid 2010 XF3 does not meet one of those requirements. Size-wise, it’s almost 150 feet wide, making it almost the size of an airplane! That’s more than twice the size of the Chelyabinsk asteroid that exploded over the Russian city in 2013, damaging 7,000 buildings and injuring 1,000 people by flying shards of glass.
