Strange asteroids fly by Earth and NASA captures the footage

A giant NASA radar in the remote Mojave Desert imaged several scary asteroids — including a 1-mile-wide giant — as they zipped through our planet’s neighborhood.

Fortunately, there are no known asteroids that could hit Earth for more than a century, and the likelihood of an impact by the largest class of asteroids (like the one below) in the next few thousand years is extremely low. Still, the images give planetary scientists valuable information about what’s out there and how to prepare if a truly threatening space rock comes our way.

“Photo or it didn’t happen!” NASA posted on X, formerly Twitter.

The first image below shows the mile-wide (1.5-kilometer) asteroid 2011 UL21 as it passed 4.1 million miles (6.6 million kilometers) away on June 27. Of course it didn’t graze the Earth, but in terms of space, it’s very close – 17 times the distance from the moon.

And it turns out that this asteroid was not alone. A smaller moon orbits it 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) away.

Mashable’s Speed ​​of Light

“About two-thirds of asteroids of this size are thought to be binary systems, and their discovery is particularly important because we can use measurements of their relative positions to estimate their mutual orbits, masses and densities, which provide key information about how they may have formed,” Lance Benner, a principal scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.

The next image reveals an impressively detailed view of the 500-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) asteroid 2024 MK, which flew about 184,000 miles (295,000 kilometers) from Earth two days later on June 29 (which is closer than the moon, which is about 238,900 miles away). “This was an incredible opportunity to investigate the physical properties and obtain detailed images of a near-Earth asteroid,” Benner said.

“This was an incredible opportunity to investigate the physical properties and obtain detailed images of a near-Earth asteroid.”

An asteroid 500 meters across would pose a serious danger to earth if it landed in a populated area. A much smaller rock, about 100 to 170 feet across, could create an explosion large enough to destroy Kansas City. That’s why NASA is proactively preparing to avoid such a threat, whenever one might come our way.

All three asteroids were picked up by NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar, a 230-foot-wide (70-meter) radio antenna near Barstow, California. NASA scientists sent radio waves to the objects and the reflected signals bounced back.

The tweet may have been deleted

The dangers of an asteroid strike

Here are today’s general dangers from asteroids or comets, small and very large. Importantly, even relatively small rocks are still a threat, as the surprising 17-meter rock that erupted over Russia and blew out people’s windows in 2013 proved.

• Every day about 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles fall through the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up immediately.

• Every year, on average, a “car-sized asteroid” hits the sky and explodes, NASA explains.

• Impacts from objects about 460 feet in diameter (140 meters wide) occur every 10,000 to 20,000 years.

• A “dinosaur-killing” impact from a rock perhaps half a mile or larger occurs on 100-million-year time scales.