Terrifying asteroid speeding towards Earth today, will come as close as 789000 km: NASA

What if an asteroid heads for direct collision with Earth? Will we survive or will the asteroid cause global annihilation or will humanity somehow survive? If you’ve got such questions, then NASA might finally have an answer for you now. With the success of NASA’s DART test, when the space agency carried out its first planetary defense test, an asteroid named Dimorphos was deflected off its course by crashing a spacecraft into it, just like a missile. So, if it was heading for Earth, this strategy could be used against it. However, not all asteroids are large enough to be destroyed by colliding a spaceship into them. Now, NASA has revealed that another asteroid is on its way headed towards Earth and today, it will come very close, just a little farther than the moon.

Asteroid 2022 TE1 key details

Now, NASA has warned that an asteroid named Asteroid 2022 TE1 is heading for Earth and is expected to pass by the planet closely today, October 13. Asteroid 2022 TE1 is already on its way towards us travelling at a staggering speed of 39744 kilometers per hour.

The asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth today at a distance of just 789000 kilometers or 0.005273 astronomical units. An astronomical unit (AU, or au) is basically a unit of length equal to the average, or mean, distance between Earth and the Sun, that is, 149,597,870.7 kilometers.

NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office is responsible for monitoring the skies and keeping a watch on various Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). If any celestial object is at risk of Earth impact and comes within 8 million kilometers of the planet, the organisation red flags the NEO and issues an alert.

NASA DART test details

According to NASA, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit the larger asteroid Didymos. Astronomers studied the collision data using various telescopes and revealed that the orbit time was reduced by almost 32 minutes. The studies were conducted with the help of various images captured by the spacecraft’s camera named cubeSAT LICIACube (Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids) which is made up of two key components, LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid), both of which captured key data from the collision.