Is It Worth Worrying About a “potentially Dangerous” Asteroid Flying Past Earth Today?
Today, even as you struggle to focus on work after a long weekend that I hope you enjoyed, a giant space rock screams through space at a “potentially dangerous” distance from Earth. According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the chances of an ensuing Armageddon are extremely slim (and always have been) as asteroid 2021 KTI passes within 4.5 million miles of Earth. But on a galactic scale, that distance is still pretty close, given the vast, unexplored universe.
Still, it’s a cold comfort knowing that everything is technically okay, even as our space agency is tracking a huge chunk of rock that is flying in “potentially dangerous” proximity to our fragile planet at 40,000 miles per hour.
How big is the 2021 KTI asteroid?
On a large scale, asteroids – which isterrifying to behold – are technically not that big, but that is only compared to other free-roaming space rocks that easily overshadow the largest buildings on the planet.
By comparison, an asteroid designated 2021 KTI is roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower or Seattle’s space needle. This is still quite a lot, especially when you imagine the Eiffel Tower heading towards Earth at 40,000 miles per hour. The KTI will be followed by several more asteroids, none of which are very large, but all of them are expected to safely bypass us on Wednesday or earlier without entering our planet’s atmosphere.
However, all of these asteroids are technically classified as Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), which NASA defines as:
An asteroid or comet that orbits between 91 and 121 million miles (195 million kilometers) from the Sun, which means they can travel within 30 million miles (50 million kilometers) of Earth’s orbit.
How often do asteroids actually make contact with Earth?
Asteroids vary greatly in size, and hence the extent to which they collide with Earth. According to NASA , smaller asteroids “several meters in size are found passing between the Earth and the Moon’s orbit several times a month,” while even smaller meteoroids (less than three feet) make contact with solid earth every day. These are not cosmic stones that you need to worry about; there are larger, more disturbing asteroids catapulted through space. On the other hand, the space agency claims that none of them (which we know of) will pose a threat to humanity for at least 100 years.
Or, as the space agency put it:
The highest risk of collision with a known asteroid is 1 in 714 probabilities of a collision with an asteroid designated 2009 FD in 2185, which means that the probability of a collision is less than 0.2 percent.
It’s very good that asteroids do not hit the Earth with regularity on a human scale. For more than forty years, the prevailing opinion among paleontologists and researchers is that the dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid that crashed into the Earth . The blow was enough to lead to the extinction of the dominant species on the planet, with the exception of avian dinosaurs.
Needless to say, the impact of a massive asteroid is likely to lead to some kind of global cataclysm, if not the end of human civilization as it currently exists – but while NASA isn’t worried, you don’t need to worry either.