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NASAscientists have eject absorbing images of anasteroidthat zipped past Earth this week — revealing it to be the shape of a weird acrobatics snowman .
The asteroid , named 2024 ON , flewsafely past our planetat a distance of 620,000 miles ( 1 million kilometers ) — roughly 2.6 times the distance between the lunation and Earth — on Tuesday ( Sept. 17 ) . It was traveling at 19,842 mph ( 31,933 km / h ) , or around 26 times the speed of audio .
The “potentially hazardous” asteroid 2024 ON looks like a tipsy cosmic snowman in these radar images obtained by the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar.
The newfangled prototype were captured by the GoldstoneSolar SystemRadar near Barstow , California on Sept. 16 . They showed that the skyscraper - size asteroid resembles something like a Arachis hypogaea . That ’s because 2024 ON is in reality two asteroid that became lock by their own gravitational attraction into a formation acknowledge as a physical contact binary after they do too tightlipped to each other . Other illustrious physical contact binary includeSelam , a double - lobed ' moonlet’orbiting the asteroid Dinkinesh in the main swath between Mars and Jupiter , andArrokoth , a frosty object beyond the orbit of Pluto that was studied by NASA ’s New Horizons probe in 2015 .
" This asteroid is classify as potentially hazardous , but it does not pose a chance to Earth for the foreseeable future tense , " NASAwrote in a statement . " These Goldstone mensuration have allowed scientists to greatly trim the uncertainty in the asteroid ’s distance from Earth and in its succeeding motion for many decades . "
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NASA deem any space aim that come within 4.65 million mile ( 7.5 million km ) of our planet as " potentially risky , " even if they pose no immediate threat to Earth . That ’s because even slight nudges to such an asteroid ’s flight — say , by bumping into another asteroid — could get off it onto a hit course of instruction with Earth .
NASA chase after the locations and orbit of some 28,000 asteroids by scanning the entire night sky every 24 hours . The space bureau has estimated the flight of all these close - Earth objects beyond the ending of the century , and found that Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years .
