ational Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA did another research about what's coming next on planet Earth, and it involves another space rock or asteroid that has the half size of Mount Everest coming on April 29. Luckily, there's no need to panic as Earth will not be directly hit with the space rock but will just pass along.
What's coming next on Earth? An asteroid half the size of Mt. Everest!
One of the biggest asteroids that could ever pass outside planet Earth is about to be seen on April 29 at 09:56 GMT. According to NASA, this asteroid named 52768 (1998 OR2) is expected to have the size as large as the highest mountain on Earth, Mount Everest. The estimated size of this space rock will be around 1.8 to 4.1 kilometers in diameter.
As explained, 1998 OR2 will pass within 3,908,791 miles of Earth, moving at 19,461 miles per hour. Though the size of the asteroid seemed to be too large for planet Earth to handle, NASA reiterated that humans do not need to see this space rock as part of the 'end of the world' fiasco since it will not land on the planet but only passes on the planet.
Though the chances of 'collision' are too low, NASA said that they are still studying about other asteroids that may harm the planet since an estimated number of 30 new 'near-Earth objects' (NEOs) every week were being spotted. In fact, at the start of 2019, they had discovered a total of more than 19,000 objects coming towards near the planet.
"Our goal is to discover and track all the potentially dangerous asteroids and comets long before they are likely to approach Earth," said NEAT Principal Investigator Eleanor Helin.
NASA admits that they still lack on further studies about asteroids
NASA is accurate that planet Earth will not collide with this Mt. Everest-sized asteroid; however, they also clarified that since their studies are not yet finished with their NEO catalog, a possibility that Earth can be joined 'anytime' with an asteroid on an unpredicted time and schedule is much higher.
"Impacts of larger objects are expected to be far less frequent (on the scale of centuries to millennia)," explained by the agency. "However, given the current incompleteness of the NEO catalog, an unpredicted impact - such as the Chelyabinsk event - could occur at any time."
At the same time, NASA commends its team of pushing their limits on finding these NEOs in space in order to warn if something is coming towards the planet.
"[The asteroid's discovery comes] on the heels of last month's installation of new state-of-the-art computing and data analysis hardware that speeds our search for near-Earth objects," said NEAT Project Manager Steven Pravdo of JPL in a statement at the time of the asteroid's discovery. "This shows that our efforts to find near-Earth objects are paying off."
