International Asteroid Day welcomes two cosmic visitors
The flyby of two asteroids coincides exactly with International Asteroid Day on June 30, but without posing any danger.
Within a few days, two large asteroids flew past the Earth, similar to this rendering.
(Image: ImageBank4u/Shutterstock.com)
Two asteroids have narrowly missed Earth this week. This rare event coincides with the celebration of International Asteroid Day today, according to space agencies around the world.
One of them is the asteroid "2024 MK". With a diameter of around 200 meters, it passed its closest point to Earth at 300,000 kilometers yesterday at 9:46 a.m. German time. Since then, it has been increasing its distance again. At the time of its approach, the asteroid could be seen as a bright dot with simple binoculars in many parts of the world, for example in the southwest of America. "The object is moving fast," said Juan Luis Cano, a member of the Planetary Defense Office of the European Space Agency (ESA).
2024 MK discovered only two weeks ago
Researchers only discovered this asteroid on June 16. The fact that they only spotted such a large celestial body shortly before its flyby underlines the need to improve the ability to monitor potentially dangerous near-Earth objects, the ESA emphasized.
The second asteroid is called "2011 UL21" and is the larger of the two. According to the ESA, with a diameter of 2.3 kilometers, it exceeds 99 percent of all known Near-Earth Objects (NEO). Its closest point to Earth was 17 times the distance to the moon last Thursday. It can only be observed with powerful telescopes.
As the news portal TH reports, approaches by asteroids of this size are rather rare and only occur every ten years on average, according to the Virtual Telescope Project. Even though the New York Times dubbed the two cosmic visitors as killer asteroids, the two celestial bodies posed no danger to Earth.
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