NASA Alert: 100-Foot Asteroid Speeding At 17379 MPH For Close Encounter With Earth

This asteroid that is about the size of an airplane, is being tracked by the US space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as it is set to get very close to Earth today. NASA has revealed that this is a 100-foot asteroid and it will get to within 3.14 mn miles at its closest Earth approach.

NASA has dubbed it as Asteroid 2025 DL8 and it will get very close to our planet on March 7. Astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, have classified it as being a near-Earth object (NEO), but not a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA). The asteroid belongs to the Apollo group of asteroids.

According to the Small-Body Database Lookup, Asteroid 2025 DL8 is rushing toward its close Earth approach at an astonishing speed of 17379 miles per hour.

Notably, NASA expects it to fly by the Earth at the above-mentioned distance and not get any closer than this.

However, this is not the last that Earthlings would be seeing of this asteroid. The data that was collected by various NASA telescopes shows, after an analysis by CNEOs, that the asteroid will actually be coming back toward Earth, but only after over 75 years. Database Lookup suggests, it will come back in the year 2103 in the month of May.

What are asteroids?

These are space rocks built of metals, rocks, dust and other materials. They are small and orbit the Sun. Their main home is the main asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. However, some get ejected from there and they are the ones that then become potential danger to Earth as their new orbits may bring them close to our planet. These asteroids follow paths that brings them into the inner solar system and they are dubbed as NEOs when space agencies find and track them.

How are asteroids tracked?

Ground based telescopes keep a watch on the sky, taking multiple images of specific areas of the sky to identify objects that may be moving against the still background. This is how many NEOs are initially detected. It is not the perfect model, but the most viable one available. There are separate space based craft too that aid in tracking asteroids.