Asteroid 2011 am24 to make close flyby, NASA tracks potential threat
The WION service reports that a potentially hazardous asteroid, 2011 AM24, will approach Earth on July 26. The announcement was issued by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of the Asteroid Watch programme. The object, with a diameter of about 500 metres, is moving at a speed of over 6,276 kilometres per hour. Experts predict that asteroid 2011 AM24 will pass Earth at a distance of 6.4 million kilometres.
NASA classifies asteroids as potentially hazardous if they move around the Sun in orbits that intersect Earth's orbit or come near it. This category includes asteroids that come within less than 0.05 astronomical units (19.5 lunar distances), which is about 7.5 million kilometres and are large enough to cause a regional-scale disaster in the event of a collision with Earth.
Asteroid will pass by Earth
NASA has classified Asteroid 2011 AM24 as a Near Earth Object (NEO). It also belongs to the Apollo group, which consists of asteroids that orbit close to our planet and cross its orbit. Sometimes, they also cross the orbits of planets such as Venus or Mercury. According to data from January 1, 2023, 17,402 asteroids belonging to the Apollo group were known. For comparison, in January 2017, "only" 8,316 were known.
2011 AM24 orbits the Sun every 467 days, and its following close approach to Earth will not occur until September 2038. NASA closely monitors the path of this asteroid and similar objects. The agency is also continually working on developing planetary defence, which aims to protect Earth from asteroids that may be on a collision course in future.
In September 2022, NASA caused the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft, with a mass of about 600 kilograms, to collide with the asteroid Dimorphos, which is comparable in size to the Great Pyramid of Giza and is the moon of the asteroid Didymos. This successfully altered the orbit of the foreign object. However, a side effect was the ejection of a large amount of dust and rocks into space. Some of the resulting fragments were even a metre in diameter.
