A potentially hazardous asteroid was detected to fly by Earth on March 4, at 03:00 a.m. ET (local time).
A potentially hazardous asteroid was detected to fly by Earth on March 4, at 03:00 a.m. ET (local time).
An asteroid was detected to fly by Earth on March 4, at 03:00 a.m. ET (local time).
The asteroid is called 138971 (2001 CB21) and its size is up to 1.3 kilometers (0.81 miles) in diameter, approximately four times as wide as the Eiffel Tower and comparable to the size of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Discovery of 2001 CB21 Asteroid
Gianluca Masi, an astronomer at the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, detected the 2001 CB21 asteroid on Jan. 30 when the asteroid was over 21.5 million miles away from Earth.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) classified the asteroid as a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA),” as per the Space Reference organization.
Also classified as a Near Earth Asteroid (NEA), the classifications on 2001 CB21 are based on its predicted relative closest distance, 4,911,102 million kilometers (3,051,617 miles), when it passes on Earth.
To put into perspective, the distance of the asteroid when it passes Earth is about 13 times between Earth and the moon.
The asteroid has been categorized as a small Apollo-class Asteroid (APO) since its orbit will cross Earth’s orbit.
Further categorization of APOs is also based on the asteroid’s size.
2001 CB21 makes an orbit around the sun once every 384 days (1.05 years), as per Space Reference.
Source: Nature World News