Asteroid Heading Towards Earth Measures Twice the Size of Football Field, NASA Says

NASA's tracker detects an asteroid twice the size of an American football field heading towards Earth later this week, but it will almost certainly miss. The asteroid 2022 OE2 is just under 110 meters long and more than twice the size of an NFL-specified American football field.

(Photo: Alexander Antropov/Pixabay)
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Asteroid 2022 OE2 Heads Towards Earth

The asteroid 2022 OE2 is about 224 meters wide, falling within the 170-380 meter range proposed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. It will pass Earth at a speed of 115,776 kilometers per hour on Wednesday, August 4. NASA's calculations, however, indicate that it will safely fly by Earth at a distance of more than 5 million kilometers. This is nowhere near the distance of the Moon's orbit around the Earth, about 384,000 kilometers.

NASA monitors tens of thousands of near-Earth objects and has calculated their trajectories to the end of the century. According to NASA, Earth will be safe from a catastrophic asteroid impact for the next 100 years. Despite this, astronomers are aware that a minor change in trajectories, such as a collision with another asteroid or the gravitational pull of a planet, can alter a large asteroid's orbit and send it on a potentially disastrous collision course with Earth. As a result, space agencies prioritize planetary defense.

Double Asteroid Redirection Test to Change Asteroid Direction

In November 2021, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, sending a spacecraft directly into the 525-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphos in autumn 2022. According to a previous report by Live Science, the asteroid will not be destroyed by the collision, but it may slightly alter its orbital path. The mission will help to test the feasibility of asteroid deflection if a future space rock threatens our planet.

The DART Mission aims to launch a specially designed rocket that will alter the path of an asteroid by punching it with a rocket fast enough to change its direction by a fraction of a percent. NASA compared it to a pillow fight in microgravity. The technology involved includes the kinetic impactor technique, which should be capable of altering the motion of an asteroid in space. It will be the first kinetic impactor demonstration attempt. A spacecraft will collide with an asteroid at around 6.6 kilometers per second, forcing it to change the speed of its orbit. Even if only by a fraction of a percent, astronomers would be able to observe and measure it.

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How Large Asteroids Impact the Earth

Brian Toon, a geoscientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said that a space rock 0.5 miles wide would emit the equivalent of 100 billion tons of trinitrotoluene, or TNT. At 30,000 miles per hour, an asteroid the size of a house would pulverize all man-made structures up to half a mile from ground zero. A larger rock, the size of a 20-story building, would flatten anything within 5 miles of the point of impact. Yet, according to Richard Binzel, professor of planetary sciences at MIT, there are no giant rocks in our vicinity that are large enough to destroy life on Earth.