The flyby won’t be an extinction event, but the destruction might be extensive. A massive asteroid twice the size of New York’s Empire State Building will fly by Earth in September.
The 774-meter asteroid will be closer than the moon during its flyby. Known as 2010 RJ53, with a diameter of 774 meters, it is set to pass by Earth on 9th September as predicted by NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s asteroid database browser.
It will be at a closer distance of 3,66,000 Kilometers than the moon, which is 3,84,400 away from the planet.
Another asteroid, not a giant, is said to fly past the Earth on Sunday. The asteroid 2010 PT will pass the Earth at a distance of 5 million kilometres approximately.
Not as big as 2010 RJ53, Asteroid 2021 PT still has a diameter of 137 meters, making it more significant than a football field and taller than the famous Statue of Liberty.
Despite these asteroids passing by Earth at such a short distance, the planet has been declared risk-free by NASA for the next century, and they will not have any such impact on the Earth.
However, there is still a potential for danger, as gravitational tugs can change or divert the past of an object in the universe.
The impact of the danger of an asteroid remains among the worst possible natural disasters in the history of the planet, and the human race does not have much power of battling with them, which is why the astronomers around the world continuously monitor the asteroid paths and calculate their trajectory to see if they are a threat to the planet.
