Astronomers have just discovered an asteroid that looks dangerous because its orbit will collide with Earth next year. Fortunately, the recalculation of its orbit shows that this asteroid collision will not happen.
Asteroid 2022 EA1 was first discovered on January 7, 2022. This 70-meter long asteroid had worried astronomers because it looked like it would hit Earth on July 4, 2023.
"In January this year, we learned of the highest-ranking asteroid on the Palermo scale we've seen in a decade, reaching -0.66," European Space Agency astronomer Marco Micheli said in a statement. /2022).
"Almost 10 years at ESA I have never seen such a risky object," he continued.
The Palermo scale is used to measure how dangerous a near-Earth asteroid is based on the probability of a collision and its predicted strength. Asteroids with a Palermo scale below -2 are not a threat, -2 to 0 are worth watching, and numbers above them are alarming.
If an asteroid the size of 2022 EA1 hits Earth, it is likely that the impact could destroy a city, dealing damage equivalent to the nuclear bomb that was dropped on the city of Hiroshima in World War II.
The team from the Near-Earth Object Coordination Center (NEOCC) first measured the asteroid's orbit a week after it was discovered. Their calculations show that asteroids are facing a growing threat of collision, and data from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggests the same.
Asteroid 2022 EA1 then disappeared from view for a week due to bright light from the Moon. When this asteroid returned, new observations changed astronomers' calculations.
According to the latest data, this asteroid will pass the Earth with a safe distance of about 10 million km. This distance is equivalent to 20 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.
What worried astronomers at first was that the predicted date of the collision was very close, just one year from now. There's not enough time to launch a mission that could destroy or deflect the asteroid's path.
Astronomers believe that if asteroids were discovered long ago, there are many ways that can be used to avoid dangerous collisions. NASA itself launched the DART mission in November 2021 to find out if this asteroid deflection technique could work.