The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued an alert against an asteroid named Asteroid 2023 HH3 passing close to Earth today, i.e., April 25.
The passing distance between the Earth and the Asteroid is just around 402,000 kilometres which is quite the same distance as the moon.
According to NASA, Asteroid is approaching close to Earth and travelling at a speed of 48052 Km/h.
The Asteroid 2023 HH3 belongs to the Apollo group of Asteroids. These groups of asteroids are close to Earth and named after the homogenous 1862 Apollo Asteroid discovered in 1930 by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth.
The size of the Asteroid is close to 43 feet, which is almost equal to the size of a bus.
What are Asteroids?
Asteroids are small rocky objects surrounded by the orbit of the sun. The size of the Asteroids is much smaller than the sun.
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In our solar system, there are millions of known Asteroids. Currently, there are around 1278661 asteroids in our cosmos.
These Asteroids are the leftovers from the formation of our solar system.
According to NASA, our solar system is 4.6 billion years old, and when a big cloud of gas and dust collapsed, the material fell to the centre of the cloud and formed the sun.
NASA monitors asteroids constantly
NASA and its subsidiaries constantly monitor the movement and speed of these Asteroids using telescopes and observatories like NEOWISE.
They also use ground-based telescopes such as the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), based in the Antofagasta Region of the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Along with NASA, the European Space Agency is developing an early warning system for protecting Earth from these dangerous asteroids.
