Asteroids seem to have resumed their potentially disastrous near encounters with Earth. NASA keeps track of these objects by analysing data from observatories and telescopes like Pan-STARRS, the Catalina Sky Survey, and the NEOWISE telescope. The majority of this gear is securely planted on the ground, but a few bits are free to wander the skies.
NASA established the Planetary Defense Interagency Group to keep an eye out for potential threats to Earth (NEO). The Small-Body database, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Center for Near Earth Object Studies are all included (CNEOS). All of these areas have contributed to our present knowledge about this asteroid.
The latest threat to Earth is from Asteroid named asteroid 2021 AE. As of February 3, This asteroid has come within 1.8 million kilometres of Earth. Asteroid 2021 AE is expected to approach Earth today at a speed of 22,186 kilometres per hour. According to NASA, it has a diameter of roughly 460 feet and travels in an orbit that carries it beyond Mars' orbit and as near to the sun as Venus' midway.
The Planetary Science Division at NASA's headquarters in Washington, DC, maintains a Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). The PDCO's responsibility is to detect PHOS as soon as possible. The PHOS category includes comets and asteroids whose orbits bring them within 0.05 astronomical units of Earth (5 million miles or 8 million kilometres).
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NASA's recently completed DART mission was designed to guard against exactly these kind of attacks from space. Dart was NASA's effort to test whether it was feasible to redirect an asteroid. With the successful completion of this test, we took a huge step ahead in the international effort to develop strategies that will allow us to prevent any major rock from ever impacting the planet.
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The DART weighed 570 kg, which is a substantial amount of weight. Despite the fact that DART was meant to destroy the asteroid, it was not its main goal. According to NASA, the DART mission succeeded in deflecting the asteroid.
