Asteroid, faster than a ballistic missile, headed for Earth! Clocked at 27508 kmph by NASA

Asteroids frequently make trips to Earth and although most of them burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere itself, it is possible one could pass through and impact the planet. Some have done so in recent years, but they have been small ones and did not leave behind a trail of destruction, except for a couple of them. But how big must an asteroid be, to end all life? Well, NASA scientists estimate that an asteroid would have to be about 96 km wide to completely and utterly wipe out life on Earth. Though smaller asteroids also have the potential to cause localized damage, commonly referred to as city-killers. Unlike bigger ones which seldom stray towards Earth, smaller asteroids frequently fly close to the planet. Now, another one is on its way.

Asteroid 2022 UV14 details

According to the-sky.org, the Asteroid 2022 UV14 was discovered just last month on October 27. It belongs to the main Apollo group of asteroids and takes 1254 days to orbit the Sun during which its maximum distance from the Sun is 531 million kilometers and minimum distance is 150 million kilometers.

NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office has alerted that the Asteroid 2022 UV14 will make its closest approach to Earth today, November 11. It will pass Earth at an extremely close distance of 4.1 million kilometers. The asteroid is already hurtling towards the planet at a staggering speed of 27508 kilometers per hour, which is faster than a hypersonic ballistic missile!

NASA’s space-based telescope called NEOWISE has identified hundreds of others while scanning the skies at near-infrared wavelengths of light from its polar orbit around Earth. But the NEOWISE wasn’t built for this purpose.

It was a data retrieval project to get back asteroid detections and characteristics from WISE, a NASA observatory launched back in 2009. In 2011, the coolant aboard the spacecraft ran out, which is necessary as the spacecraft used cryogenically cooled detectors that made them sensitive to infrared light. Since the spacecraft’s infrared sensors were working efficiently, NASA repurposed it to track various Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) such as asteroids, and it was named NEOWISE.