A 190 feet wide asteroid named Asteroid 2022 PC just missed Earth today.
A 190 feet wide asteroid named Asteroid 2022 PC, nearly the size of a Boeing 747 aeroplane, just missed Earth today at around 5:37am, according to NASA. Iit passed by Earth at a safe distance. This asteroid was missed by the space and sky monitoring agencies and was just recently discovered on August 1.
Asteroid 2022 PC is different from previous asteroids that have flown past Earth recently as it does not belong to the Apollo group of asteroids but the Aten group. The asteroid orbits around the Sun, taking almost 295 days to complete 1 orbit.
The Asteroid 2022 PC flew past Earth on August 18 at 05:37am at a distance of 3.9 million kilometers at a staggering speed of 14,580 kilometers per hour. This asteroid did not pose any viable threat to Earth and passed the planet safely though it was still classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid due to the close proximity of its encounter with Earth.
According to Sky.org, it is at a maximum distance of 159 million kilometers from the Sun. On the other hand, its distance from the Earth is just 6.31 million kilometers, equivalent to 0.04 astronomical units. An astronomical unit (AU, or au) is basically a unit of length equal to the average, or mean, distance between Earth and the Sun, that is, 149,597,870.7 km (92,955,807.3 miles).
More and more asteroids have been flying past Earth albeit at a safe distance. NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office monitors the skies with telescopes and keeps track of upcoming near-Earth object (NEO) flybys. With the help of advanced telescopes, more than 750,000 asteroids have been discovered to date, of which more than 27,000 are near-Earth asteroids.
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