ASTEROID THAT WOULD ZIP PAST THE EARTH ON 17th SEPTEMBER 2024

 

Before starting on this write up I want to make one thing very clear ...and that is, the Asteroid I am writing about below would not come anywhere near the Earth or affect us in any manner.....nevertheless, it is an interesting object to study.... 

An asteroid named 2024 ON that has an estimated diameter between 220 to 480 meters will zip past the Earth at a speed of about 32000 Km/hr on the coming Tuesday or 17th September. 

At the closest approach this asteroid would be around 1 million Km away from us which is 2.6 times the average distance between the Earth and the Moon.

 NASA does a great job of tracking 28000 asteroids which are termed as NEO( Near Earth Objects)   those objects that come within 193 million Km of the Earth. 

NASA also terms those coming within 7.5 million Km as Potentially Hazardous Objects ( PHO). 

All these NEO's and PHO's are being continuously tracked by a telescopic system known as ATLAS( Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) which is an array of 4 telescopes that perform a scan of the entire night sky every 24 hours. 

NASA has estimated the trajectories of all these NEO's even beyond the end of this century and as per their studies, the Earth faces no known danger from a dangerous asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years.

 However after all this still the YARKOVSKY EFFECT has to be accounted for which is a force by thermal photons that is acting on a rotating body which can affect its orbit. 

Its significance is felt most for smaller asteroids with a dia of 10 Cm to 10 Km. This effect makes the asteroids alter their orbits but hopefully NASA would be studying that aspect as well.