Giant Asteroid ‘2019 ON’ Just Passed Our Earth And We Didn’t Even Blink

Giant Asteroid ‘2019 ON’ Just Passed Our Earth And We Didn’t Even Blink

Asteroids ranging from big, small, coney, non-coney, keep whizzing past our Earth all the time. Asteroids that are sized at around 1 km (0.62 mi) diameter strike Earth every 500,000 years on average. However, asteroids that range in size starting from 5 km (3 mi) objects happen to strike our Earth once every twenty million years.

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We’ve already covered several asteroid stories in the past where some of these near-Earth objects just silently passed by Earth without us even noticing, while others came in dangerously close to Earth. One such 181-feet long asteroid named “2019 ON” zoomed past Earth today at 6:53 AM IST or 11:23 AM ST at a speed of 10,300 miles per hour. The asteroid didn’t pose any major risk since it didn’t manage to hit our Earth.

Asteroid “2019 ON” was spotted by NASA and was just about 0.01729 astronomical units or about 1.6 million miles from the center of the Earth and the last time it when the asteroid passed by our Earth was back in July 2018 when it approached Earth from a distance of roughly 4.4 million miles. And it’s next trip by Earth is expected to be on July 30, 2020. It was just last week when the news of asteroids dubbed 2019 OD, 2015 HM10, and 2019 OE, moving past our Earth came to light. Another asteroid 2019 OK also moved past our Earth at a ‘dangerously; close distance of 70,000 kilometres, barely missing from hitting our Earth.

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Now although the asteroid 2019 OK didn’t manage to hit our Earth, asteroid collisions pose a major danger to Earth, and cause massive destruction if they do manage to collide.