“2008 OS7” is the name of the asteroid that will make a close encounter with our planet on Friday, February 2 of this year. 15.41 Polish time. But according to astronomers, we can sleep soundly because the flight distance will be 2.8 million kilometers.
The asteroid will pass near us at a speed of about 18 kilometers per second. The size of the object is estimated at 210 to 480 metres, so it is a relatively rare occurrence, compared to almost daily close-up images of objects with smaller diameters, for example several metres.
An asteroid approaching Earth. We know the details
The asteroid orbits the sun for approximately 2.6 years. It belongs to the Apollo group, that is, a group of near-Earth asteroids whose orbits intersect not only with the orbit of our planet, but also with the orbit of Venus, and sometimes even with the orbit of Mercury. The group's name comes from the asteroid (1862) Apollo. Astronomers know approximately 19,000 asteroids of this type.
In general, near-Earth objects (mainly asteroids) are called “near-Earth objects”, in short – near-Earth objects. Scientists include in this group objects whose orbits are 1.3 astronomical units closer to the Sun (an astronomical unit is the average distance of the Earth from the Sun, about 150 million kilometers).
There are tens of thousands of known near-Earth objects. They are detected, indexed and tracked by dedicated monitoring projects. Among them are the so-called Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), i.e. those objects that lie within 0.05 AU (19.5 distances to the Moon) and are large enough to cause a regional catastrophe in the event of a collision (sizes larger than 140 metres).
Asteroid 2008 OS7 belongs to the group of potentially hazardous asteroids (close-up at 0.019 AU).
Information about the asteroid's expected close pass is publicly available on the Internet. They can be tracked, for example, on the website of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
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