Asteroid Flyby: Get the Details on Speed, Size, and More!
Asteroid 2023 SZ, one of the 1,298,148 asteroids identified by space agencies, is currently heading towards Earth and may reach its closest point to our planet today, September 25. NASA, utilizing its sophisticated space and ground-based telescopes, closely monitored the asteroid’s trajectory, revealing crucial information about its velocity, proximity, and other characteristics.
Asteroid 2023 SZ: Approach details
According to the US space agency, Asteroid 2023 SZ is expected to make its closest approach to the planet at a distance of only 2.1 million kilometers and at a speed of 15,337 kilometers per hour, which is much faster than a hypersonic ballistic missile!
According to NASA, this space rock belongs to the Amor group of Near-Earth Asteroids, which are near-Earth asteroids with orbits outside the Earth but inside Mars, named after the asteroid 1221 Amor discovered by the Belgian astronomer E. Delporte in 1932.
Asteroid 2023 SZ is not classified as a potentially hazardous object due to its relatively small size. Only objects larger than 492 feet in diameter are considered hazardous. By comparison, Asteroid 2023 SZ is 59 and 131 feet wide, making it almost the size of a house or a small airplane.
Asteroid collisions in 2023
Asteroids often come close to Earth, but did you know that one of them hit the planet this year? NASA revealed that on February 15, a 1,000-pound space rock turned into an atmospheric fireball and disintegrated about 21 miles above Earth’s surface and was found near McAllen, Texas. Law enforcement in the McAllen area received several calls from residents who reported hearing a loud explosion. According to NASA, the space rock traveled at about 43,000 kilometers per hour and its energy was about 8 tons of TNT.
Then on July 6th, a meteor struck and hit a woman sipping coffee on her patio! According to a report by the local French newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, a meteor that bounced off the roof hit a woman sitting on her terrace in the village of Alsace in eastern France.
He later had the rock examined by a geologist named Dr. Thierry Rebmann, who confirmed that it was indeed a meteorite from space!
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