On Jan. 29, an asteroid dubbed 2021 AG7 will make a safe but very close flyby of our planet. Scientists at NASA are tracking the near-Earth object currently traveling the solar system, nearly crossing our orbit.
During its close approach, asteroid 2021 AG7 will be 11 times the distance between the Moon and Earth, approximately 4.2 kilometers from our planet.
NASA has revealed that the asteroid travels across the solar system at an astronomical speed of 16.6 kilometers per second. Overall, this would mean that the asteroid has a speed of about 59,760 kilometers per hour.
If the asteroid flew from Earth to the Moon, the space rock would take approximately six hours to complete the trip. For comparison, the Apollo 11 crew took more than three days to get back to the Moon in 1969.
Is there a probability of an impact event?
Dinosaurs became extinct when an asteroid collided 66 million years ago with our planet. But what is the probability that this will happen again?
Earth is very old and has been impacted by many asteroids over its lifetime. The most prominent asteroid impact on Earth is, of course, the one that contributed to the disappearance of dinosaurs and virtually all other living creatures on Earth at the time.
When the asteroid, which was larger than Mount Everest, struck our world about 66 million years ago, fire rained from the skies, and Earth shook even more than any other recent earthquake.
The impact of the asteroid was so great that it caused a series of natural disasters, and when the planetoid landed in the water, tsunamis formed that spread thousands of miles in several directions. The explosive explosions that occurred from this series of events would have demolished everything in their way for hundreds of miles.
If an asteroid is on the way to strike Earth now, we would have a warning, and we would know what we had to do with it, which would presumably include launching a spaceship just to move it away from reaching Earth, which is widely referred to as "asteroid impact avoidance."
There is no use in stressing about these kinds of incidents. We already have the technology now to potentially do something about some asteroid that may be coming in a bit too close to Earth.
Before our imaginations run away from us, we need to consider the time periods involved and the variability of the case before we fear the repetition of events as dinosaurs walked the planet.
