Jakarta – The United States Institute of Aviation and Space, NASA, is tracking asteroids that are approaching Earth at 27,000 miles per hour. The asteroid with an average diameter of 25 meters is estimated to have crossed and passed at its closest distance to Earth on Tuesday, January 7, 2020, at 2.44 am EST or 14.44 WIB.
NASA named the celestial bodies as Asteroids AV1 and classified them into objects near Earth or NEO. According to NASA’s orbital observations, the AV1 is proportional to the size of four London-level buses lined up in a row.
Even if it crashes, Nasa makes sure the space rock is too small to survive through the Earth’s atmosphere. “Rocks smaller than 25 meters in diameter are likely to burn when they enter the Earth’s atmosphere and cause little or no damage,” a statement from NASA said, as quoted by the Express page, Monday, January 6, 2020.
AV1 is called crossing Earth’s orbit on a path similar to the Asteroid 1862 Apollo. NASA also classifies it as NEO because it includes comets and asteroids in orbit that can bring them very close to Earth.
“Some asteroids and comets follow orbital paths that bring them closer to the Sun and Earth as usual,” NASA said. “If the comet or asteroid approach takes it into 1.3 solar astronomical units, we call them near Earth objects.”
NASA’s tracking system first saw AV1 on Sunday, December 5, 2019. The AV1 asteroid appears to be a smaller representative of the NEO family, but the rock is moving at breakneck speed.
“If a rocky meteorid greater than 25 meters, but smaller than one kilometer hits Earth, it is likely to cause local or regional damage to the affected area.”
The good news is that Asteroid AV1 is not expected to be close enough to attack the planet. At its closest point, the space rock was calculated approaching the planet from a distance of about 0.01858 astronomical units. An astronomical unit represents the distance from Earth to the Sun or about 93 million miles (149.6 million kilometers).
