NASA Asteroid Tracker: 'Hazardous' Rock To Skim Earth Closer Than The Moon

An asteroid is set to skim past Earth this week and is said to be so close that it will be nearer than our moon. Not only that, the asteroid can actually pose some “potentially hazardous” effects to the planet if it changes its trajectory and hit us.

In a report, the asteroid labeled as 2019 SP3, is expected to zoom past our planet this coming Thursday. It will be so close that NASA is quite interested in its arrival. The space rock is not that big in size. It is only 19 meters long and described in the report as “just slightly smaller than the height of Buckingham Palace, which stands at 24 meters tall.”

NASA said that the rock will fly by at a distance of 0.97 lunar distances (LD). LD is the Earth’s distance to the moon, which means that the asteroid is going to be really close. The space rock will miss Earth by just 231,690 miles and travel at 8.7 kilometers per second or more than 31,000km per hour.

Because of this, scientists have regarded the 2019 SP3 as potentially hazardous. “Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth. Specifically, all asteroids with a minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) of 0.05 au or less are considered PHAs,” NASA said.

The 2019 SP3 is roughly the same size as the Chelyabinsk meteor. Back in 2013, a 20-meter meteor was reported to have exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The phenomenon caused windows to smash and injured more than 1,000 people around the area.

The event shook all international space agencies and pretty much questioned the planet’s preparedness in the event of a bigger, more powerful asteroid hitting the planet in the future.

Per NASA, because of our atmosphere, there is a very slim chance that an asteroid with devastating effects can ever truly hit the planet. However, there is still one in 300,000 chances every year that a space rock can cause some serious regional damage much like what happened in Russia.

This is why scientists are working on early monitoring devices that can warn us if such an event could occur and how to actually deflect such a space rock from ever reaching our planet. Per a report by IBTimes, the number of asteroids skimming too close to Earth has increased in recent years.