According to NASA, a space rock nearly 500 meters wide should “graze” the Earth this Sunday around 11 p.m.
This is not the first time that this asteroid, dubbed 388945 (2008 TZ3), approaches our planet. Discovered in 2008, it returns cyclically, every 732 days.
Could this be the remake of the Deep Impact disaster film? Do not panic, the asteroid will be some three million kilometers from our blue planet this Sunday evening, around 11 p.m. French time. This is enough for NASA, the famous American space agency, which describes the object as “potentially dangerous”
eight times farther than the moon
This designation is a matter of scale. For NASA, if an asteroid approaches less than 4.65 million kilometers from Earth, it is placed in the boxes of potential dangers.
If on the scale of the universe, this distance represents more or less nothing, on the human scale, it is another story. The three million kilometers that separate us from 388945 (2008 TZ3) are eight times greater than the distance between the Earth and the Moon. There is therefore little danger of a frontal collision with our terrestrial globe.
The asteroid is still moving very fast, at 37,400 kilometers per hour, more than 30 times the speed of sound. Its next approach will be in May 2024, but this time it will be over seven million miles away.
This is not the only phenomenon visible in this night from Sunday to Monday. Indeed, some of the inhabitants of the Earth will be able to attend a total lunar eclipse. The star will gradually turn red between 5:29 a.m. and 6:54 a.m.
