The asteroid is three times larger than the Empire State Building

We first discovered and classified it in 2003 Object close to the earth I.e. as an object that interferes with the Earth’s orbit. He has already passed very close in 2015 and 2018, and now we return to meet him on December 17, 2021, where he will be 5 million kilometers from Earth, which is 14 times the distance between us and the Moon.

It sounds like a huge distance, but trust me, when it comes to space, big asteroids, it’s not. Samuel Gorville, a researcher at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, explained this well: “Imagine the Earth being the size of a tennis ball; our moon is about the size of a coin, more than one and a half meters from us.

It’s called the 2003 SD220, and it’s three times larger than the Empire State Building. If this was our first meeting with him we would probably have been a little nervous, but in fact we know his orbit so well that the risk of collision is practically zero.

“Asteroids are the building blocks of all objects in the solar system,” says Corville. “These are remnants of what was around the planets when they formed, so by studying them we can understand where the Earth is coming from and what’s around it.”

This content is created and maintained by third parties and is imported to this page to help users provide their email addresses. You can find more information about this and similar content at piano.io.