An asteroid that is as big as an airplane at 81-feet is all set to have a close encounter with Earth today, according to the US space agency NASA. This asteroid will get as close as 2,080,000 miles of Earth at its closest point. NASA is tracking the asteroid in its orbit as it speeds towards our planet.
This space rock has been dubbed as Asteroid 2025 EA4. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Small-Body Database Lookup, the asteroid has been classified as a near-Earth object (NEO). It has also revealed that it belongs to the Aten group of asteroids. There are 4 separate groupings of asteroids as revealed by NASA. Apart from Aten, these include Atira, Apollo and Amor asteroids. Atira is the biggest at over 1855 metres, Aten is next at 1,100 metres, Apollo follows at 1500 metres, and finally, there is Amor at 1000 metres.
Asteroid 2025 EA4 is traveling at an astonishing speed. According to the Small-Body Database Lookup, its speed is as high as 7774 miles per hour.
The asteroid will come back and make another close approach again in the future. The next time it will do so is in 2047 and the month will be April. At that time, it will have picked up speed and will likely be travelling at more than double its current speed at 17650 mph.
Hera Mission
The European Space Agency (ESA) had launched the Hera Mission on October 7 2024. It is a planetary defence mission. Hera mission is to visit the first asteroid ever (Dimorphos asteroid) to have had its orbit altered by human action when NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into it in 2022. Hera's job is to help turn asteroid deflection into a potentially repeatable technique.
The idea behind it all is to have a working system that can deflect an asteroid that is threatening to collide with Earth in the future.
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