Two 10th-grade girls from India discovered a new asteroid near the orbit of Mars that is currently heading toward Earth. So can we move that Doomsday clock up a notch now?
Well, not so fast. While the asteroid that 15-year-old Vaidehi Vekariya Sanjaybhai and Radhika Lakhani Prafulbhai sighted during a Space India and NASA initiative was confirmed to have its sights set on Earth, it may not even come this way for another million years, give or take.
DISCOVERY ALERT!
We are proud to announce VAIDEHI VEKARIYA SANJAYBHAI and RADHIKA LAKHANI PRAFULBHAI, two students of P.P. SAVANI CHAITANYA VIDYA SANKUL (CBSE) from Surat with the help of SPACE-AIASC discovered a new Asteroid which is a Near-Earth Object named HLV2514. pic.twitter.com/HXpOvrwxNY— SPACE India (@Spacian) July 25, 2020
The big news for this asteroid, though, isn’t the time frame, but rather the fact that it is projected to change its course in that time to come very close to Earth. Asteroids pass closely to Earth relatively often, but this one is said to be large enough to cause some problems. This data is all calculated by software that analyzes images collected from NASA’s PAN Star telescope in Hawaii. Senior educator and astronomer Aakash Dwivedi told CNN last week that “Asteroids are taken very seriously by NASA. Since this asteroid is changing its orbit it has become news.”
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