The latest close-up images reveal that the asteroid “potentially hazardous” 2024 ON safely passed by Earth on September 17.
NASA scientists have just released fascinating images of an asteroid flying past Earth last week – showing it has a peculiar snowman-like shape rolling through space.
The asteroid “potentially hazardous” 2024 ON appears snowman-like in radar images captured by the Goldstone Solar System Radar of the Deep Space Network. (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech).
The asteroid named 2024 ON passed by our planet at a safe distance of 1 million kilometers – about 2.6 times the distance between the Moon and Earth – on September 17. This asteroid is moving at a speed of 31,933 km/h, which is 26 times the speed of sound.
The new images were taken by the Goldstone Solar System Radar system near Barstow, California, USA. They show that this asteroid is as large as a skyscraper. Asteroid 2024 ON is actually two asteroids locked together by their own gravity into a contact binary system after coming too close to each other.
Other well-known contact binaries include Selam, which orbits the asteroid Dinkinesh in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and Arrokoth, a frozen object beyond Pluto’s orbit that has been studied by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft since 2015.
No danger to Earth
NASA states: “This asteroid is classified as potentially hazardous, but it does not pose a threat to Earth in the near future. These Goldstone measurements have significantly reduced uncertainty about the asteroid’s distance from Earth and its future motion for decades.”
NASA considers any object in space within 7.5 million kilometers of Earth to be “potentially hazardous”, even if they do not pose a direct threat to Earth. This is because even a slight impact on the orbit of such an asteroid – for example, colliding with another asteroid – could cause it to collide with Earth.
NASA monitors the position and trajectory of about 28,000 asteroids by scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours. The agency has determined that Earth is not facing any threat from a catastrophic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years.
