A HUGE asteroid has made a “close approach” to Earth in the past hours.
Asteroid 2015 DR215 had been expected by the experts at Nasa to buzz past Earth in the early hours of Friday morning.
The asteroid has made it onto Nasa’s ‘close approach’ list and stands out as one of the largest on the table.
At up to 1,607 feet wide, the asteroid is more than three times larger than the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
An asteroid of this size would cause some serious damage if it hit Earth.
There’s no need to panic though,as Asteroid 2015 DR215 did pass us at a distance of 4.1million miles.
That may sound pretty far away but in the grand scheme of space, this isn’t a large distance at all.
Read our Asteroid 2015 DR215 live blog for the latest news and updates…
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NEO mission
Nasa is hoping to launch its Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission in 2026.
If the agency does so, it will finally have a spacecraft dedicated only to hunting asteroids.
It’s hoped that the NEO Surveyor craft will find 90 percent of asteroids that are 460 feet or larger within the first decade of its mission.
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What is a NEO?
Nasa considers anything passing near Earth’s orbit a Near-Earth Object (NEO).
Thousands of NEOs are tracked by scientists to monitor whether they’re on a collision course with our planet.
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What are Trojan asteroids?
These asteroids are in the same orbit as a bigger planet, but they don’t crash because they congregate around two specific spots – L4 and L5 Lagrangian points – in the orbit.
The Sun’s and the planet’s gravitational pulls are counterbalanced by a trojan’s proclivity to fly out of orbit.
The Jupiter trojans are the most numerous of the trojan asteroids.
They are estimated to be as abundant as asteroids in the asteroid belt.
There are trojans on Mars and Neptune, and in 2011, NASA reported the finding of an Earth trojan.
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What is the Main Asteroid Belt?
The bulk of known asteroids orbits between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, with relatively short orbits.
There are between 1.1 and 1.9million asteroids bigger than one kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter in the belt, as well as millions of smaller ones.
The gravity of freshly created Jupiter stopped the development of planetary bodies in this region early in the solar system’s existence, causing the tiny things to smash with one another, fragmenting them into the asteroids we see today.
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Asteroids approaching: 2022 EZ1
Amor-group Asteroid 2022 EZ1 flew near Earth around 4:30am on Sunday, after being studied for only four days before.
The 51-foot object approached Earth from 4.55million miles away, and is set to orbit nearby again in 875 days.
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Asteroids approaching: 2022 EM
This giant Apollo-class asteroid approached Earth on Sunday morning around 9:00am, which is exactly what was predicted.
2022 EM flew past Earth at a distance of 4.41million miles.
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Asteroids approaching: 2022 DT3
2022 DT3 flew past Earth on Saturday night around 9:30pm at almost 12 miles per second.
The 71-foot long asteroid was about 2.33million miles away from Earth.
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Asteroids approaching: 2022 DO1
2022 DO1 approached Earth Saturday night around 9:40pm.
The celestial object is about 48-feet in size, and it came within 1.57million miles of Earth.
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Asteroids approaching: 2020 DC
First observed on February 16, this small body is approximately 51 feet in size.
On Sunday morning around 4:00am, the Apollo-class Asteroid approached the Earth as its orbit crosses the Earth’s orbit, but it’s not considered potentially hazardous.
The house-sized body came 924,000 miles away from Earth.
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What is considered a ‘close approach’?
If an asteroid comes within 4.65million miles of Earth and is over a certain size, it is considered “potentially hazardous” by cautious space agencies.
Friday’s upcoming large asteroid fits this description.
The asteroid should shoot past from its safe distance at a speed of just under 19,000 miles per hour.
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Nasa flagged Asteroid 2015 DR215
Asteroid 2015 DR215 is expected to pass us at a distance of 4.1million miles.
That may sound pretty far away but in the grand scheme of space, this isn’t a large distance at all.
Nasa has flagged the asteroid as a “close approach”.
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How big is Asteroid 2015 DR215?
At up to 1,607 feet wide, the asteroid is larger than the Empire State Building.
New York’s most iconic building stands at 1,454 feet tall.
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Nasa monitors thousands of asteroids
Nasa has its eye on nearly 28,000 known near-Earth asteroids, and discoveries of new asteroids are said to go up by their thousands each year.
On that note, Nasa is hoping to launch its Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission in 2026.
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Nasa upgrades asteroid software, part four
Previously, scientists had to manually do calculations to try and work out the Yarkovsky effect and its impact on an asteroid’s path.
The hope is that the software can also help Nasa spot any potentially hazardous asteroids it may have missed.
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Nasa upgrades asteroid software, part three
The Sentry-II software will finally let scientists take the Yarkovsky effect into account when they’re trying to figure out if an asteroid is going to hit Earth.
This was something the original software, called Sentry, couldn’t do.
Davide Farnocchia, a JPL navigation engineer, said: “The fact that Sentry couldn’t automatically handle the Yarkovsky effect was a limitation.”
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Nasa upgrades asteroid software, continued
Nasa will be upgrading its 20-year-old software with a new algorithm called Sentry-II, which will periodically scan a table of known potentially hazardous asteroids and their orbits.
Sentry-II will then calculate if any of the asteroids on the table or added to the table have a risk of hitting Earth.
The new system will be taking into account something called the Yarkovsky effect, which refers to when an asteroid absorbs sunlight and emits it as heat.
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Nasa upgrades asteroid software
NASA has upgraded its asteroid hazard software to better detect potentially dangerous space rocks.
The US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) uses a special type of software to assess potentially hazardous asteroids that could slam into Earth.
There’s no known imminent “doomsday asteroid” on its way but astronomers check the sky often just as a precaution.
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Where are asteroids found?
Asteroids are found mostly in three areas of the solar system.
The majority of asteroids are found in a large ring between Mars and Jupiter’s orbits.
More than 200 asteroids bigger than 60 miles (100 kilometers) in diameter are found in this primary asteroid belt.
According to NASA, the asteroid belt includes between 1.1million and 1.9million asteroids bigger than one kilometer (3,281 feet) in diameter, as well as millions of smaller ones.
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When will it pass by?
The next “close approach” of Asteroid 2015 DR215 will be on March 11.
“2015 DR215 has 31 close approaches predicted in the coming decades,” SpaceReference.org reports.
The next time it will be relatively close, at least for a space object, is March 22, 2028, when it will b
e8,505,157km from Earth. -
How are asteroids found, continued
NASA has been leading a program to find and track near-Earth asteroids since around 2000.
According to CNEOS, programs like the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and the Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii specialize in locating asteroids and have identified hundreds of them.
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How are asteroids found?
Giuseppe Piazzi, an Italian priest and astronomer, accidentally found Ceres, the first and biggest asteroid, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, while drawing a star map in 1801.
Ceres, while being categorized as a dwarf planet today, is responsible for a quarter of the mass of all known asteroids in or around the main asteroid belt.
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Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?
The extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by an asteroid impact, according to a team of scientists who were evaluating whether the newer theory that volcanoes led to their demise was accurate.
The researchers used a variety of methods to assess ancient temperature records and the amount of greenhouse gases that could have been in the atmosphere.
According to the study results, volcanic gasses may have also played a role in the decline of the dinosaurs.
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What is a meteorite?
If a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it begins to vaporize and becomes a meteor.
On Earth, it’ll look like a streak of light in the sky, because the rock is burning up, and it may look like a fireball or “shooting star.”
If a meteoroid doesn’t vaporize completely and survives the trip through Earth’s atmosphere, however, it can land on Earth and becomes a meteorite.
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Difference between asteroids, meteors, and comets, part three
Like asteroids, a comet orbits the Sun.
However, rather than being made mostly of rock, a comet contains lots of ice and gas, which can result in amazing tails forming behind them as a result of the ice and dust vaporizing.
“They range from a few miles to tens of miles wide, but as they orbit closer to the Sun, they heat up and spew gases and dust into a glowing head that can be larger than a planet,” Nasa reported.
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Difference between asteroids, meteors, and comets, continued
When two asteroids hit each other, the small chunks that break off are called meteoroids.
“Meteoroids are objects in space that range in size from dust grains to small asteroids. Think of them as ‘space rocks,'” Nasa reported.
