Asteroid hitting earth 202212/3/2023 In addition to the potentially threatening 2022 AP7, astronomers discovered two other smaller space rocks in DEC observations, one of which is the closest to the sun ever seen. "There are likely only a few with similar sizes left to find, and these large undiscovered asteroids likely have orbits that keep them interior to the orbits of Earth and Venus most of the time," Sheppard said. The good news is that most of these unknown asteroids likely follow orbits that keep them safely away from Earth. However, Sheppard believes that only a few unknown "planet killers" are left in this difficult-to-observe region. "So far we have found two large near-Earth asteroids that are about 1 kilometer across, a size that we call planet killers," Sheppard said.īecause the inner solar system asteroids are so hard to detect, they are underrepresented in models of the overall solar system space rock population. The discovery of 2022 AP7, which would be much more damaging than Chelyabinsk if it were to hit Earth, was only possible thanks to the supersentive Dark Energy Camera (DEC) at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which scans the sky during twilight hours when these asteroids can be detected within two 10-minute periods each day. Sheppard, an astronomer at the Earth and Planets Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution for Science and the lead author of the paper describing the new discovery, said in a statement. "Only about 25 asteroids with orbits completely within Earth's orbit have been discovered to date because of the difficulty of observing near the glare of the sun," Scott S.
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