An astronomer from the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy captured this asteroid in a picture coming towards us on 30 January. Astronomer- Gianluca Masi noticed this using an Earth-based telescope. Then it was 35 million kilometers away from the Earth.
The asteroid can be seen as a tiny white dot in the image shared on the website of the Virtual Telescope Project.
A report in Newsweek states that this asteroid revolves around the Sun in 384 days. This is slightly longer than the time taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun. Categorizing an asteroid as ‘potentially dangerous’ does not mean that the asteroid can harm us. This means that it is capable of coming very close to us. The size of the asteroid is also taken into account while categorizing. Last month, another asteroid came close to Earth. That asteroid named 7482 (1994 PC1) was more than 1 kilometer wide and passed close to Earth on 18 January.
So far, the danger of any asteroid hitting the Earth has not been detected, but if such a situation arises in the future, NASA is working to deal with it. NASA has launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. Under this, the spacecraft has to collide with the asteroid, in order to induce it to change trajectory. It can be crashed in September-October this year.
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