Nasa Unveils Massive Asteroid: A Stunning Space Discovery Over Two Football Fields Wide!

Calling asteroid 1997 QK1 just a “space rock” is a bit of an understatement. This celestial object is 660 feet wide, which is over twice the length of two football fields!

Recently, on August 20, the asteroid made its closest approach to Earth in over 350 years, coming within 1.9 million miles. This flyby gave scientists a chance to study its shape, size, and rotation using radar images from NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar.

Nasa classified this asteroid as potentially hazardous, but reassured us that it poses no immediate threat. What’s interesting is that there are millions of asteroids orbiting the sun, remnants from the solar system’s formation about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of these are harmless, mostly hanging out in the zone between Mars and Jupiter. However, sometimes, gravitational forces push some of them closer to Earth.

Right now, there are no asteroids on a collision course with us. NASA is currently monitoring almost 40,000 large asteroids, with thousands more likely still out there. Every year, telescopes discover hundreds of new ones.

According to Lindley Johnson, a former planetary defense officer at NASA, asteroid impacts are extremely rare. “You might see one that poses a real threat about once a century,” he noted.

However, when an asteroid does make contact, it can be catastrophic. For instance, a 100 to 170-foot-wide asteroid could flatten a small city. In 2013, a 60-foot meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia, causing considerable damage and injuring around 1,600 people.

To counter this risk, various countries are working on systems for early detection and deflection. NASA’s DART mission in 2022 demonstrated that we can alter an asteroid’s path, successfully nudging a harmless one off its course. Still, recent studies have shown that the results are more complex than initially thought.

The detailed radar images of 1997 QK1 allow scientists to understand better how such asteroids operate. Through a series of 28 radar images, researchers learned that it spins completely every five hours and has a unique peanut shape, made up of two rounded lobes. Interestingly, around 15% of near-Earth asteroids of this size have a similar form, suggesting that many are not solid but rather loose clusters of rubble that have come together over time.

NASA anticipates that 1997 QK1 will swing by even closer in 2039, coming within 1.5 million miles of Earth, which is still about six times farther than the moon.

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