At the end of the 20th century NASA launched the Near-Earth Object Programme, aimed at finding and tracking the movement of celestial objects whose orbits could bring them into close proximity to our planet. The space agency so far has found an estimated 25,000 NEOs to date.
2020 TGI belongs to the most dangerous category of asteroids – Apollo, meaning its orbit will intersect that of our planet. But NASA says it will safely pass our planet at a distance of 7,027,201 miles. In December, Earth will be visited by an unusual asteroid called 2020 SO, categorized as a "potentially hazardous" object. One of NASA’s leading experts, Paul Chodas, suggested that the celestial body may in fact be debris from a rocket NASA sent to the Moon in 1966.
SPUTNIK
With just 73 days left in 2020, NASA has published an alert that not one, but five asteroids are passing by Earth today, as the agency’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft prepares to touch down on a space rock 200 million miles away.
ReplyDeleteThe first three of the day’s five space rocks have mercifully passed the Earth by without incident, according to the Asteroid Watch Widget that tracks asteroids and comets that will make relatively close approaches to our planet.
2020 TJ6, measuring 10m in diameter or roughly half a bowling lane, passed the planet at a blistering speed of 40,824kph, but at a safe distance of 1.2 million km. The asteroid was followed by 2020 UX, the tiniest out of the five, which passed the Earth at 190,000km, and 2020 TD6, with a diameter of 7.4m or half the height of the Hollywood Sign.