Can an asteroid really hit Earth in September?
Asteroid 2006 QV89 is a space rock, it measures around 40 meters in diameter and may hit our planet next Monday, September 9th at 9:03 in the morning (Spanish time) with a speed of 44,000 kilometers per hour, according to experts at the Conference on the Detection of Asteroids and Space Garbage held in Darmstadt (Germany). But before you panic,astronomers ruled out the asteroid's chance of impact with Earth as the probability of an impact is negligible: 1 out of 11,428.
"With the data we have now, the probability of an impact [occurring] is equivalent to being run over by a train if we cross a blind track, without being able to see or hear if the train comes, but knowing that one passes every fifteen hours,''says Ettore Perozzi, from the Italian Space Agency (ASI).
The asteroid is ranked 7th on the list of ‘The potentially most dangerous asteroids for Earth’, in the next 100 years. Remember that the risk of an asteroid being potentially dangerous is estimated from the Palermo Scale, which takes into account the size of each rock, the probability of impact and the time remaining until the possible collision.
The exact trajectory and probability of collision will not be known until July.
Some experts foresee that the fate of the particular asteroid will be as such: it will explode into the atmosphere, so that its shock waves would only cause damage in low proportions. Similar to the event in Chelyabinsk (Russia), in 2013, when a rock of about 20 meters injured about 1,000 people.
This was not the case in Tugunska, Siberia when in 1908 a meteorite devastated an area of 2,000 square kilometers and destroyed 80 million trees. Something similar could happen in September if the asteroid it finally hits the Earth. A situation that is not feasible at the moment.
NASA's NEOWISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) hunter discovered ten space rocks classified as potentially dangerous to our planet.
Top 10 Asteroid Threats
29075 (1950 DA) that would impact us in 2880
101955 Bennu (1999 RQ36) that would impact us in 2175-2199
410777 (2009 FD) that would impact us in 2185-2198
(1979 XB) that would impact us in 2056-2113
(2007 FT3) that would impact us in 2019-2116
99942 Apophis (2004 MN4) that would impact us in 2060-2105
(2010 KV21) that would impact us in 2021-2116
(2010 GD37) that would impact us in 2019-2101
(2001 CA21) that would impact in us in 2020-2073
(2016 NL56) that would impact us in 2023-2118
Upcoming actions
In 2022, NASA will send the DART spacecraft to divert the moon Didymoon from the asteroid Didymos in an attempt to participate in an "Armageddon Plan": using explosives to try to change the course of asteroids.
The European Space Agency will send operation HERA in 2023 and test the same theory from another space fragment known as the asteroid (65803) Didymos - as large as Egypt's Great Pyramid - from the same orbit.
Source: NEOWISE, NASA.
