A giant 650-feet wide asteroid is going to pass close to Earth, according to United States space agency NASA. The asteroid, named 2023 CL3 by NASA, is expected to reach closest to Earth, at a distance of under 7.2 million km on May 24.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has listed the space rock on its recently released Near-Earth Asteroids list. It is worth noting that this distance is much greater than that between Earth and the Moon.
The US space agency has said in the past that an asteroid with a diameter of around 96 km can actually completely extinguish life on Earth. But smaller asteroids can still cause tremendous harm to life and property on our planet.
So, scientists are intrigued by 2023 CL3 as the asteroid’s size is more than twice as big as the Statue of Liberty. New York’s iconic landmark stands at 305 feet at its base.
NASA considers size and proximity when assessing the risk an asteroid poses and only considers an object a potential threat when it is larger than around 500 feet and is set to pass within around 4.6 million miles (roughly 7.4 million km) of Earth.
Last month, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) released a list of four asteroids that were going to pass by our planet harmlessly.
JPL’s Asteroid Watch dashboard tracks asteroids that will make close approaches to Earth. This dashboard displays the approximate object diameter, date of closest approach, and relative size and distance from Earth for each encounter.
Interestingly, NASA had carried out a mission to move an asteroid away from Earth. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission involved a spacecraft crashing into Dimorphos, the tiny moon of near-Earth asteroid (65803) Didymos.
