Space is definitely very agitated at the beginning of the year 2023. A large asteroid will again pass this Saturday between the Earth and the Moon, an event without danger but which will serve as a planetary defense training exercise, a we learned Friday from the European Space Agency (ESA).
The asteroid was first spotted on February 27 by an observatory in La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands. It will pass this Saturday at 7:49 p.m. GMT at about 175,000 km from Earth (a third of the distance that separates us from the Moon), at a speed of 28,000 km/h.
2023 DZ2 is estimated to be between 40 and 70 meters in diameter, large enough to wipe out a major city if it were to collide with our planet. But there is no need to worry, said Richard Moissl, head of ESA’s planetary defense office.
A rare situation
Small asteroids pass overhead every day. At the beginning of March, seven of them even touched the Earth. But the passage of such a big one so close to the blue planet only occurs every ten years, according to Richard Moissl. The International Asteroid Warning Network has therefore decided to take advantage of such a closeness, and 2023 DZ2 will be analyzed using a series of instruments such as spectrometers and radars.
The goal is to discover everything that can be learned about an asteroid in just one week, says the scientist. This will serve as a practice for how the network will “respond to such a threat” in the future, he added.
According to astronomers’ calculations, the asteroid will pass Earth again in 2026, but at a greater distance and will not pose a risk of impact for at least the next 100 years.
At the beginning of March, astronomers had detected a similarly sized asteroid, 2023 DW, and assessed the risk of a collision with Earth at 1 in 432 in 2046. But this probability has dropped, following more precise calculations and any risk is now ruled out.
If such an object were ever to make its way towards us, Earth would not be defenseless. Last year, NASA’s DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos, about 11 million kilometers from Earth, and managed to divert its course.