Asteroids are too small to support life and they cannot hold onto any kind of atmosphere. How small are they? NASA says that the collective mass of all the asteroids in the Solar System is even less than the mass of our Moon! But these tiny leftovers of the early Solar System can be deadly in case they hit the Earth they can create havoc. In fact, if big enough, they can even be called planet killers. The danger unfortunately, never goes away and now NASA has revealed that a massive asteroid is zooming towards Earth at a blistering speed of 21549 km per hour, CNEOS data mentioned.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which keeps an eye on all the near-Earth objects in space has informed that a humongous 110-feet wide asteroid 2022 UP2 is all set to make its closest approach to Earth tomorrow. This is flagged as a potentially hazardous asteroid not just because of its massive size but the uncomfortably close distance that it is expected to come to Earth.
NASA explains that any asteroid that comes within 4.6 million miles or 7.5 million kilometers of Earth, or if it measures larger than about 150 meters is said to be a potentially hazardous object. Hence, the asteroid 2022 UP2 is termed a potentially hazardous object as it will come as close as a distance of 2.53 million miles to Earth.
Asteroids keep hitting the Earth! You must have heard tales about an infamous Chicxulub asteroid that caused massive destruction on Earth around 66 million years ago. This is the asteroid that ended the era of the dinosaurs. In recent years, small ones have crashed on Earth and some of the bigger ones have caused major damage, as did the asteroid in Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013. This asteroid was anything between 17-20 meters in size. That's
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