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Asteroids: 360-foot rock heading for Earth in a few hours

Bluemount Score / Pixabay

Space enthusiasts can look forward to another asteroid coming this way as NASA has spotted one particular rock speeding towards Earth’s orbit. The agency’s scientists also predict that the asteroid will be approaching Earth in a span of hours.

Express reports that NASA’s asteroid trackers caught sight of a rock formally known as 2017 BM123, named after the year it was discovered, moving Earthbound at a speed of 29, 304 kilometers per hour and is predicted to approach the planet in a span of hours. Classified as a Near-Earth Object or NEO, BM123 measures around 157 feet to 360 feet in diameter, making it a relatively large-sized rock heading for the Earth’s orbit. It is slightly larger than the Big Ben clock tower in London and the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Because of its size, BM123 can either burn up as it gets to the atmosphere, or it can only cause local damage to the area it crashes on. Then again, there is also the possibility that it may hit the water instead of land.

BM123 will fortunately only pass by the planet and will get as close as 0.02680 astronomical units. In human terms, this is equivalent to 4.01 million kilometers, making it extremely far away but close enough to be detected by NASA.

Meanwhile, NASA announced that Elon Musk’s space program SpaceX would launch the Psyche spacecraft in 2022, Forbes reports. This is to study the similarly-named asteroid within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Psyche mission is set to launch in July of 2022, with a budget of $117 million and will mark the first NASA launch for the Falcon Heavy rocket.

The launch of Falcon Heavy will take place at Cape Canaveral in Florida in the Launch Complex 39A. Within the spacecraft, there will be two secondary payloads, EscaPADE and Janus, which will study the atmosphere of Mars and binary asteroids, respectively.

The Psyche asteroid is believed to be abundant in metals, mainly made up of an exposed nickel-iron core from an old planet, which may have been the foundation of the Solar System.

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