NASA says 'potentially hazardous asteroid' to make its closest approach to Earth on Aug 13

An asteroid classified as ‘potentially hazardous’ is hurtling toward our planet and will make its closest approach on August 13. Dubbed 2015 FF, the asteroid has an estimated diameter between 42 and 92 feet (13 and 28 meters) and will swing by Earth at a staggering speed of over 33,000 km per hour. However, there is no need to fear as despite being considered hazardous, the space rock will pass from a safe distance of 4.3 million kilometres, which is more than eight times the distance between Earth and the Moon.

An asteroid is classified as 'potentially hazardous' when a near-Earth object comes within 7.5 million km of Earth and is about 140 meters, approximately 500 ft in diameter. A 'near-Earth object', on the other hand, is classified as such when its distance from our planet is under 193 million km, according to NASA.

Five asteroids in three weeks

Notably, this would mark the fifth asteroid that would be zooming past our planet in the last three weeks. From July 29 to the month's end, four asteroids namely 2016 CZ31, 2022 OG1, 2022 NU1 and 2013 CU83 made their closest approaches and their sizes ranged from 40 feet to 600 feet.

Out of these four, the 2022 OG1 was the smallest as it measured just 40 feet across whereas the 2013 CU83, measured a whopping 600 feet. These four asteroids as well as the incoming one are among the 28,000 such objects which are monitored by NASA through the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). According to Live Science, it is an array of four telescopes that scan the entire sky once every 24 hours. 

While there is no chance of any asteroid striking our planet any time soon, NASA is preparing a defence system for Earth and it is testing its technology through the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. Under this mission, the agency launched a spacecraft toward a binary asteroid system which would intentionally crash into one of the asteroids to see if the impact changes the space rock's trajectory. If the idea works, it could be used to deflect the path of an asteroid if any moves on a collision course toward our planet.