This impact has caused concern and scandal in the crowd, through the news and social networks, producing even the prediction of a possible "end of the world". But... is the information shared in such a way correct? I invite you to continue reading where I will explain in detail the possible astronomical event.
The asteroid, named "2007 FT3", was discovered by NASA radars on March 20, 2007. Following this, the U.S. space agency routinely followed up to see if the body could pose a threat to the planet. The tracking resulted in the asteroid impacting Earth on October 3rd. The object has a diameter of 340 meters, weighs 55 billion kilograms and travels at a speed of 30 km per second. The collision would have a force of 2,700 tons of explosive TNT.
Despite this, the probabilities of impact are one in 11 million or 0.0000092% in percentage of cataclysm. These possibilities give relief to the population since practically rounding the quantity would give a number of 0. The asteroid will pass at a distance of approximately 420,000 km.
"This is not too paradoxical: if an asteroid is going to be very close to Earth, a collision cannot be ruled out from the beginning."
"Eventually, the probability of impact will be reduced, usually abruptly, to zero or, if the asteroid is really on a collision trajectory, it will continue to grow until it reaches 100 percent".
The asteroid can be seen on October 3 in observatories, and with its trajectory it will pass again on October 2, 2024, October 3, 2025 and October 2, 2029 with even more minimal probabilities of hit.
Being such a large universe, there is always a chance that some body from space will impact us. That's why NASA has contingency plans for those cases, some of them are impacting the object with a rocket that diverted its trajectory, building a kind of gravitational tractor that modified the trajectory or sending a nuclear device that destroys the body before an impact occurs.
