150-Foot Asteroid Speeding At 21638 MPH To Come Within 4.2 Mn Miles Of Earth, Says NASA

A 150-foot asteroid is being closely tracked by the US space agency NASA and its affiliates. This space rock is not just massive in size, it is travelling at astonishing speed and worryingly, it is set to make a very close approach to earth today. This space rock has been dubbed Asteroid 2025 DA7.

Notably, asteroids pose some of the biggest threat to humanity as they come in colossal sizes and are termed as city-killers or planet-killers, depending on the calculations by space agencies based on the size, speed as well as the angle of approach and impact. Asteroids can drive entire species into extinction and even have the potential to destroy all life on the planet.

For instance, the asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs impacted the planet some 65-66 mn years ago. It also laid the foundation for the rise of mammals. But that is a different story.

In more recent times, an asteroid that exploded over the skies of Tunguska region in Russia, burnt and destroyed everything under it. It was a sparsely populated region in Siberia. This was on June 30, 1908.

Another asteroid came calling on February 12, 1947. Yet another one exploded over Russia in 2013! This was in Chelyabinsk on February 15. It sent at least a thousand people to the hospital with injuries.

And these are just some of the asteroids that crashed into Earth and there were so many others that barely missed hitting Earth.

Now that space agencies track the skies 24/7 to guard against this threat to humanity, advance warnings can be made. These alerts can go wrong, of course. For instance, recent reports indicated Asteroid 2024 YR4 would crash into Earth in December 2032. However, subsequent calculations indicated it would miss Earth by a hair-breadth. Its chances are zero. In fact, it has a greater chance of crashing on the moon than on Earth.

And now, back to Asteroid 2025 DA7. Its closest Earth approach will be 4,200,000 miles and it is speeding towards our planet at 21638 miles per hour. The asteroid has been classified as a near-Erath object (NEO) and deemed to belong to the Apollo group of asteroids.

NASA has indicated that there is no chance of this asteroid crashing against Earth. It is expected to fly by at the distance mentioned.