On a night from Wednesday to Thursday, a dangerous kilometer asteroid 2014 JO25 will pass by Earth, getting closer to our planet for the closest possible distance in the last 400 years.
“The rapprochement of the” Rock “with the Earth will not be dangerous for our planet, as it will fly at a safe distance from its atmosphere.The size, proximity and speed of this asteroid once again remind us of what kind of destruction such” debris “of space Garbage, flying by the Earth every day, “- noted in the message of the observatory.
This celestial body was discovered in 2014 by the automated Mount-Lemmon telescope as part of the sky review of the Catalina Sky Survey. According to various estimates, its diameter can be from 640 meters to 1.5 kilometers. On Wednesday night, April 19, it will fly at a distance of 4.6 distances between the Moon and Earth (1.77 million kilometers), from the surface of our planet on the way to the Sun, around 2 am Moscow time.
As astronomers note, it will move at a record high speed for the asteroid – about 33 meters per second, or 118 kilometers per hour. At the moment of approaching the Earth, the 2014 JO25 will be clearly visible to observers on Earth even in the smallest telescopes due to its shiny surface.
This asteroid is included in the PHA catalog – a list of objects potentially life-threatening on Earth. To fall into the PHA (Potentially hazardous asteroids) number, the celestial body must approach our planet at a distance of at least 8 million kilometers and be large enough not to collapse as it passes through the atmosphere and cause a catastrophe of at least a regional scale.
The last flight of an object of this class, as explained by the Center for Radar Studies of Asteroids of the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Goldstone, took place 13 years ago, when the asteroid 4179 Tutatis flew about the same distance from the Earth. The next “rendezvous” of the Earth and a large asteroid will not happen soon, in August 2027, when the asteroid 1999 AN10 with a diameter of 1800 meters and a mass of 2.9 trillion kilograms will pass by the planet.