Imagine an asteroid the size of the London Eye, the mythical London Ferris wheel, or larger, approaching Earth. That is precisely what will happen on July 24 according to reports from NASA and ESA, which has included 2020ND in its list of potentially dangerous asteroids.
The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) warn of the near presence of huge space rock on our planet. According to the calculations of NASA, the asteroid has a diameter that can range between 110 and 250 meters and travels at a speed of about 13.6 kilometres per second.
Far from stopping, the celestial body 2020ND will continue its advance towards us until it is located on July 24 at just over 0.037 astronomical units (AU).
In simpler terms, we are talking about 5,535,121.2 kilometres, considering that each astronomical unit measures the distance between Earth and the Sun. This may seem anything but close, but the rock is being closely watched by the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies from NASA (CNEOS).
CNEOS defines these objects as “Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighbourhood.”
In the specific case of 2020ND, we are facing an asteroid, bodies that the same organism explains are “bits and pieces left over from the initial agglomeration of the inner planets that include Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.”
Exactly 0.037 astronomical units is value considerably lower than the threshold of 0.05 AU established by NASA to consider asteroids as potentially dangerous.