Fasten your seatbelts and hold on tight as one of the largest asteroids hovering in the neighbourhood will go past earth on September 1. The asteroid called Florence is named in the honour of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. The asteroid was discovered by Schelte Bus at an observatory in Australia in March 1981. Florence is 4.4 km in size and will be the largest asteroid to pass this close to earth ever since NASA had started a programme to detect and track asteroids 20 years back.
The asteroid will be seven million km away from earth which is 18 times the distance between earth and moon. It will be visible to small telescopes for several nights in late August and early September. There have many cases of asteroids passing close to earth but are estimated to be small in size as compared to Florence.
The last time Florence had passed this close to earth was 127 years back in 1890. As per the TOI report, NASA said that Florence will be an excellent target to ground based radar observations.
Notably, any asteroid larger than one km could be a reason for a planet-wide catastrophe. As per TOI report, NASA claims that there are over 880 rocks buzzing in the vicinity. Florence is among the largest of them all. If the asteroid crashes into the earth it would be an ‘Avada Kedavara’ for humanity. Earlier, in 2013, a meteor had crashed in Russia’s Chelyabinsk. The rock was about 20m and weighed 10,000 tonnes. Serious injuries and widespread damage occurred after the crash.
Meanwhile, on October 12, asteroid 2012 TC4 will pass within 50,100 km of the earth. Thankfully, the space rock is just 15 m and so there won’t be any danger.