NASA has detected a small asteroid that is expected to fly past the Earth during the first week of March. While scientists have yet to find out how close the floating space rock will get to the planet, they estimate that it could be somewhere between 11,000 miles and 9 million miles.
Researchers from the space agency's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) said on Tuesday that the object, designated as asteroid 2013 TX68, was first identified through the Catalina Sky Survey in October 2013. It was still located around 1.3 million miles away from the Earth.
NASA estimates that the asteroid is about 100 feet in diameter. The meteor that disintegrated in the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, by comparison, was only 65 feet wide.
Experts believe that if an object as big as asteroid 2013 TX68 were to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, it would generate an air burst that is twice as powerful as the one produced during the meteor crash in Chelyabinsk.
Despite the expected close flyby of 2013 TX68 on Mar.5, CNEOS scientists said there is no chance that the asteroid would impact the planet.
However, they were able to identify a remote possibility that it could hit the Earth on September 2017. The odds of the asteroid impacting the planet next year is about one in 250 million.
As for future flybys, there is a very lower probability that 2013 TX68 could impact the Earth in 2046 and 2097.
"The possibilities of collision on any of the three future flyby dates are far too small to be of any real concern," CNEOS manager Paul Chodas said. "I fully expect any future observations to reduce the probability even more."
According to the researchers, it is difficult to determine the exact orbit of 2013 TX68 around the sun because it has only been tracked recently.
Chodas pointed out that the asteroid's orbit has yet to be identified, which is why it is quite a challenge to look for it in the sky.
He said that their asteroid search telescopes will likely pick up 2013 TX68 once it reaches a close distance to the Earth during its flyby next month. This will provide them with enough data to figure out its orbit more accurately.
Photo: Andrews R.J. | Flickr
