 Show Asteroid 388945 will pass us from a distance of about 2.5 million miles away. Space scientists have warned that a huge asteroid is heading towards the Earth. According to American space agency NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), which is monitoring it, the giant space rock Asteroid 388945 (2008 TZ3) will make close approach to our planet at 2.48am on May 16. NASA further said that the asteroid is 1,608 feet wide. In comparison, New York's iconic Empire State building stands at 1,454 feet. It is also bigger than the Eiffel Tower and dwarf the Statue of Liberty too. The space rock can cause huge damage if it hits the Earth. But space scientists' calculations say it will pass us from a distance of about 2.5 million miles away. Though it may sound a huge distance, in space terms it is not. And that is why, NASA has flagged this as “close approach”. This is not the first time that Asteroid 388945 has paid us a visit. It passed very close to Earth in May 2020 - at a distance of 1.7 million miles. This space rock routinely passes the Earth - every two years, according to space scientists - while orbiting the Sun. The next time it will pass close to the Earth in May 2024 but much farther - 6.9 million miles. The asteroid will again come as close as this time in May 2163. If an asteroid comes within 4.65 million miles and is over a certain size, it's considered “potentially hazardous” by cautious space agencies. Asteroids are space debris, the remains of a planet, that keep rotating in the vast, infinite space. Scientists have warned for decades that some huge space rocks are dangerous for Earth. So, many space agencies, including NASA, are devising a plan to defend the Earth from these potentially hazardous asteroids. As a part of this plan, NASA recently launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. It aims to deflect an asteroid heading towards Earth from its path “through kinetic impact”. This means that the DART craft will collide with the asteroid with an aim to move it off course.
After the DART spacecraft ploughed into the asteroid Dimorphos, the Hubble Space Telescope captured images of the ejected plume of dust and debris that streamed for thousands of kilometres behind the space rock.Credit: NASA/European Space Agency/Space Telescope Science Institute/Hubble Humans have for the first time proved that they can change the path of a massive rock hurtling through space. NASA has announced that the spacecraft it slammed into an asteroid on 26 September succeeded in altering the space rock’s orbit around another asteroid — with better-than-expected results. Fresh images reveal fireworks when NASA spacecraft ploughed into asteroid Agency officials had estimated that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft would ‘nudge’ the asteroid Dimorphos closer to its partner, Didymos, and cut the time it takes to orbit around that rock by 10–15 minutes. At a press conference on 11 October, researchers confirmed that DART in fact cut the orbital time by around 32 minutes. Neither asteroid was a threat to Earth, but the agency tested the manoeuvre to prove that humanity could, in principle, deflect a worrisome space rock heading for the planet. “This is a watershed moment for planetary defence, and a watershed moment for humanity,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson. Tracking the aftermathDetermining whether the mission succeeded relied on more than a half dozen telescopes around the world. Ground-based optical telescopes can’t resolve Didymos and Dimorphos, which are millions of kilometres from Earth and only a few hundred metres across, so are seen as a single point in the night sky. But the telescopes can measure dips in brightness as Dimorphos cycles in front of and behind Didymos. Observers tracked these movements and compared them with pre-collision orbital times to quantify DART’s impact. This spacecraft just smashed into an asteroid in an attempt to change its path Independently, a pair of radar facilities — Goldstone Observatory in Fort Irwin, California, and Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia — turned their dishes towards the asteroid pair. Unlike optical telescopes, radar observations can discern the two asteroids as distinct objects, allowing astronomers to view their respective positions and estimate Dimorphos’s orbital period around Didymos. Both sets of observations agreed that DART’s impact knocked Dimorphos tens of metres closer to its companion and cut its orbital period to around 11 hours and 23 minutes. Although the 32-minute reduction is larger than expected, it still falls within the range of possibilities that scientists modelled. Researchers think the manouevre succeeded as well as it did because Dimorphos is more a loose collection of rocks than a solid chunk that would be harder to deflect. Another reason for the dramatic change in the orbital period is that when DART hit, a lot of debris shot out from the asteroid, creating a tail thousands of kilometres long; the recoil from it probably accentuated the potency of DART’s impact, researchers said at the press conference. “We have a lot of work ahead of us in order to really understand what happened,” said Tom Statler, a DART programme scientist at NASA’s headquarters in Washington DC. Saving EarthScientists will continue to observe the asteroid pair in the months to come, hoping to understand more about the shape of Dimorphos’s new orbit and whether DART’s impact introduced a ‘wobble’ to the asteroid. With the help of images from LICIACube — the Italian Space Agency’s probe that trailed DART and then flew by to capture the impact — scientists hope to learn more about the properties of the ejected debris. Record number of asteroids seen whizzing past Earth in 2020 But the mission’s final post-mortem won’t be complete for the better part of a decade. Launching in its wake, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission — currently slated for lift-off in October 2024 — should arrive at Dimorphos in late 2026, to observe the aftermath of DART’s impact. For now, the results indicate that the US$330-million DART mission was a success. But defending Earth from future impacts requires a few things, researchers say: knowing the locations and properties of any dangerous space rocks, and having enough time to act. DART launched in November last year and took about ten months to hit its target. If a threatening asteroid really were headed towards Earth, said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and the DART coordination lead at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, a mission would need to launch years in advance to deflect it safely. “Warning is really key here,” she said, adding that even space rocks larger than the 160-metre-wide Dimorphos might be dealt with, given enough planning and time. What asteroid will hit Earth in 2024?99942 Apophis. Is there an asteroid coming in 2028?It's the year 2028, and the European Space Agency has been carefully monitoring a worrying situation: an enormous asteroid is en route to strike Earth, although the exact point of impact is not yet clear.
How big is the 2027 asteroid?An asteroid, named "2019 PDC", was discovered that will come dangerously close to the earth 8 years from now, on April 29, 2027. The space rock is between 330 and 1000 feet in size, somewhere in between the length of 6.5 school buses to the height of two Washington Monuments stacked on top of each other.
How far will the asteroid pass in 2028?The predicted 2028 approach distance of 600 thousand miles will be the closest predicted for any PHA up to that time. In 2086 the substantially smaller asteroid (2340) Hathor will come to a distance of 550 thousand miles from the earth.
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