NASA CLASSIFIES A 1.3-KILOMETER WIDE ASTEROID HEADING TOWARDS EARTH AS 'POTENTIALLY HAZARDOUS.'

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The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which monitors celestial objects, has discovered an asteroid approaching Earth that is approximately 1.3 kilometres in diameter. The object, which has been labelled as potentially hazardous, will make a near encounter to Earth on March 4th, getting as close as 49,11,298 kilometres.

138971 (2001 CB21), a Near-Earth Object, is on its approach to the Sun and will complete its orbit in slightly over 400 days. The outer space object will be moving at a blistering 43,236 kilometres per hour as it approaches the planet. The asteroid zoomed by Earth from a distance of 71,61,250 kilometres the last time it got this close in 2006.

The asteroid's next close approach to Earth is slated for March 2043, when it will reach at a distance of only 48,15,555 kilometres from Earth. The orbital forecast was made public by the JPL's Centre for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The asteroid's orbit for its March 4 encounter with the planet has also been announced by the agency.

While the orbit was given by JPL, astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy was able to capture the object floating in space, speeding towards us. Masi captured the asteroid using a land-based telescope when it was about 35 million kilometres distant from Earth.

The 138971 (2001 CB21) was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) programme, which has been responsible for nearly 24% of all known potentially dangerous asteroids discoveries. More than 14 million asteroids and comets have been observed by the programme, which has detected 6,001 new objects, including 142 previously undiscovered NEOs, four potentially dangerous objects, and eight new comets.

WHAT ARE ASTEROIDS AND HOW DO THEY WORK?

Asteroids are rocky particles left over from the 4.6 billion-year-old origin of the solar system. An asteroid is categorised as a near-Earth object if its distance from our planet is less than 1.3 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, according to the Nasa Joint Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which tracks asteroid movement (the Earth-Sun distance is about 93 million miles).

Nasa announced last year that it had discovered the 1000th Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) when its radars picked up 2021 PJ1. The radar detection of these fast-moving objects, which began in 1968, aids astronomers in understanding NEO orbits by providing data that can extend calculations of future motion by decades to centuries, allowing astronomers to definitively predict whether an asteroid will strike Earth or simply pass close by.

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