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A “potentially hazardous” Apollo-class asteroid will be making its closest pass by Earth in more than 100 years this week. Asteroid 2014 TN17 will be zipping by Earth on Wednesday, March 26, at around 7:30 a.m. ET.
NASA defines asteroids as being “potentially hazardous” based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth. NASA further explains that for an asteroid to be considered “potentially hazardous” it has to be more than 492 feet and approach Earth within a 4.6 million mile radius.
Asteroid 2014 TN17 will be flying by Earth at a distance of around 3.2 million miles. While this may not sound close, in terms of space, it’s actually very close as NASA’s orbit viewer shows. Putting that distance into more perspective, Mars is 245.22 million miles from Earth.
The 540-foot wide Asteroid 2014 TN17 is also considered to be a “city-killer” asteroid because of its size and the fact that it will be traveling at a speed of approximately 17.17 kilometers per second (or around 38,000 miles per hour).
Apollo class Near-Earth Objects (NEO) like Asteroid 2014 TN17 are given that classification when “comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.” Specifically, space rocks are classified as Near-Earth Objects when they come within approximately 120 million miles of the sun or within 30 million miles of Earth.
While 2014 TN17 is, according to NASA, not expected to make contact with Earth on Wednesday, there is always the very small chance that something called the Yarkovsky effect could occur and alter the space rock’s orbit.
In July of last year, just 13 days after NASA discovered it existed, Asteroid 2024 MK blew by our planet at about three-quarters the distance from Earth to the moon. As a result, its trajectory changed, knocking it off course and moving it to a closer distance to Earth than it had been orbiting at before passing by the planet.
Content shared from brobible.com.