a mass the size of the Giza pyramid

• Asteroid 2024 MK is the size of a football nation

• NASA continues to track and discover new asteroids, but the risk of a catastrophic collision is very low.

NASA estimates that what the movie Armageddon told us — that an asteroid could wipe out civilization — should only happen once every few million years. But the organism is always on the lookout for the possibility of these relatively small rocky bodies. And it recently discovered one that passed relatively close to our planet.

Asteroid in sight. On June 16, the ATLAS (Asteroid Last Alert System) center in Sutherland, South Africa, discovered a new asteroid. They named it 2024 MK and said it was the size of a football stadium. It passed within 290,000 km of Earth this weekend, and the Virtual Telescope Project was tracking it, but some lucky people were able to see it with the naked eye or small telescopes.

Alarming sizeIn 2013, a Chelyabinsk supercar crashed in Siberia, and despite being about 18 meters in diameter, its impact with the atmosphere released energy equivalent to 30 Hiroshima bombs. 2024 MK had a diameter of 150 to 240 meters, and if it had collided, the explosion would have been 10 to 20 times greater than most hydrogen bombs ever created.

It would not destroy the Earth, but its impact would be terrible.. Experts like John Brown of Western University in Canada have said the impact could be close to a gigaton. If the asteroid had hit the US East Coast, he said, it would have been “catastrophic for most of the East Coast.” However, he explained, it would not be large enough to “affect the entire world.”

Two is worse than one. Just the other day, a second asteroid flew relatively close to our planet. This is UL21 from 2011, which came especially close last Thursday and was about the size of Mount Everest. With a diameter of about 2.5 km, the asteroid was about a quarter the size of the one that hit Earth 65 million years ago. Fortunately, it passed even further than 2024 MK – when it “approached” we were separated from it by 6.5 million km – and there was no chance of it colliding with our planet.

No “Armageddon” for (at least) 1000 years. These asteroids are certainly worth keeping an eye on, but the odds of them causing trouble are very low. A recent study found that the odds of asteroids around one kilometer in diameter are very low. According to Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz of the University of Colorado at Boulder and one of the study’s authors, “as far as we know, there won’t be any impacts for the next 1,000 years.”

But the “little ones” continue to worry. However, NASA is tracking another large number of potentially deadly asteroids that could destroy entire cities if they collided. The space agency has been “mapping” these asteroids for years, but 60% of these potentially dangerous asteroids have yet to be discovered.

Image | POT

In Khataka | 7,000 years ago, a meteorite fell in Siberia that eludes our understanding. The only certainty is that it was not natural.