Asteroid Potentially Bigger Than the Eiffel Tower to Fly Past Earth Next Week
On 5/28/21 at 9:14 AM EDT
An asteroid potentially taller than the Eiffel Tower is due to fly past Earth next month.
The huge space rock, known as 2021 KT1, will make a close approach to our planet on June 1 at around 10:24 a.m. EDT.
In cosmic terms, the word close is relative. Although NASA includes the pass in its close approaches data table, the asteroid will in fact zoom past the Earth at a distance of around 4.5 million miles.
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This is nearly 19 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Published 10 May 2021
Scientists are working to develop methods to prevent asteroids from wreaking havoc on Earth. “We know that currently, the U.S. has many knowledge and capability gaps for planetary defense readiness,” says one expert.. “The work we are doing today, and the opportunity to discuss that work with the broader international community at venues like the IAA Planetary Defense Conference (PDC), is helping to close these gaps.”
Ten scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) last week took part in the 7
th IAA Planetary Defense Conference (PDC), hosted by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs in cooperation with the European Space Agency.
LLNL
Simulations of NASA’s DART spacecraft, which will crash into asteroid Dimorphos in fall 2022, show the differences between modeling the full spacecraft geometry and a spherical approximation of the spacecraft. Credit: Mike Owen, Spheral ASPH code.
Ten scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) last week took part in the 7
th IAA Planetary Defense Conference (PDC), hosted by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs in cooperation with the European Space Agency.
Megan Bruck Syal, who helped lead the Lab’s participation in the event and who also was a conference session chair, said this year’s conference was planned to occur at the United Nations Office at Vienna, Austria. Due to the pandemic the conference went into a fully virtual mode, but was still held on Vienna time, which meant very early mornings for the LLNL team.
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