NASA has issued an asteroid warning for an absolutely colossal 310 feet asteroid coming dangerously close to Earth! This is what the US space agency said.
NASA has released an asteroid warning for Asteroid 2008 RW. It seems that even the month of September is not safe for asteroids. August was an eventful month with more than 40 asteroids passing close to Earth. In September, nearly a dozen asteroids also entered the second week of the month. Now NASA has issued another warning about an asteroid heading toward Earth at dangerous speeds. To study asteroids that are not in the asteroid belt, NASA has the Lucy Space Mission. NASA launched its Lucy spacecraft on October 16, 2021 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Asteroid 2008 RW on its way to Earth
NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office has warned that a hulking 310-foot-wide asteroid, dubbed Asteroid 2022 RW, is headed for Earth. It is expected to fly very close to the planet on September 12. According to NASA, the asteroid is already hurtling towards Earth at a hair-raising speed of 36,720 kilometers per hour. It will make its closest approach to Earth on September 12 at a distance of nearly 6.7 million kilometers.
Asteroid 2008 RW is not expected to impact Earth, but was still classified as a “potentially dangerous object” due to its proximity to Earth. Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are classified as potentially dangerous objects if they are within 5 million miles of Earth. Swinburne University of Technology says, “If the orbit of a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) is such that there is a (usually small) chance that it will collide with Earth and cause significant damage at some point in the future, it is It also labeled a potentially dangerous asteroid (PHA).”
According to the-sky.org, the Asteroid 2008 RW was discovered on September 8, 2008 and belongs to the main Apollo group of asteroids. The farthest point of the asteroid’s orbit from the Sun is 456 million kilometers and the closest point to the Sun is 139 million kilometers. Asteroid 2008 RW takes 1023 days to complete one orbit around the sun.
This is NASA’s first space mission to study the Trojans, a group of asteroids orbiting the sun in two groups. It is built to search for trojan asteroids millions of miles from Earth.