This week we had six known asteroids that will enter the Earth's safety area, all of these asteroids are small, they passed more than 4 million kilometers from us, the only notable one was 2023 QG, which is 56 to 130 meters wide. diameter, and passed on September 3 at 4 million 400 thousand kilometers from us.
There is no asteroid that is on a collision course with the earth that poses a risk, the 7.5 million kilometers that astronomers call and when the media mention a potentially dangerous asteroid passes close to Earth, it is a term real, “potentially dangerous asteroid” is based on two fundamental criteria.
First; It is said that it is potentially dangerous if it passes less than 7.5 million kilometers from the earth. The distance is a reference. You had to put a distance. It is a distance within the observation and analysis capabilities that we have, in fact 7.5 million. It is a rounded figure because the distance is 19.5 times and a half that which separates the Earth from the Moon (19.6 LD).
And although an asteroid passes at that distance and although it is called potentially dangerous, that does not mean that it poses a real danger, 7.5 million kilometers is a huge distance, so it is a safe passage, but it is taken into account because it is a Warning for the future, because if an asteroid enters that area it means that its orbit is very close to that of the earth and therefore it is potentially possible that in the future it ends up impacting our planet.
The second important criterion is that of size, because obviously the danger of an asteroid several kilometers in diameter is not the same as that of another that is only a couple of meters, for this reason NASA sets as potentially dangerous those that exceed 140 meters in diameter, although the term composition should also be included here, because there may be smaller asteroids that cause a lot of damage, for example, the meteor or barringer crater in Arizona, was caused by a 50-meter asteroid with a high iron content .
And although we are talking about asteroids, Comets can also be included, more than 99% of known potentially dangerous objects do not pose an impact threat in the next 100 years, as of September 2022 there were only 17 known potentially dangerous objects in the table of Sentry risk, they are objects that still cannot be excluded as potential threats during the next 100 years, there is a risk in all of them, but it is a very small risk.
And of course you can always discover a new asteroid, there are many, but they are not infinite and thanks to advances in astronomy there are fewer and fewer to be discovered, practically all the others within a kilometer close to Earth have been discovered.
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