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Asteroid 2020 VC1 is currently making its way through the solar system and on Thursday, November 12, the asteroid will reach its closest point to Earth. 28 meters long, the asteroid is more than double the size of a double-decker bus and currently whizzes through the solar system at 6.1 kilometers per second.
This is the equivalent of 21,960 kilometers per hour, which is fast enough to spin the entire planet in just over an hour.
Fortunately, the asteroid will fly at a safe distance.
According to NASA observations, the traveling space rock will fly 4.3 lunar distances.
A lunar distance is the measure between the Earth and the Moon, so the asteroid will zoom in from over 1.3 million miles away.
But even if it were to hit our planet, it would not pose a threat to life on Earth.
At 28 meters, it is similar in size to the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor.
When that meteor struck, it exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, shattering windows across the city.
However, the asteroid is close enough for NASA to describe it as a near-Earth (NEO) object, providing the perfect opportunity to study the history of the solar system.
NASA said, “NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been propelled by the gravitational pull of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.
“The scientific interest in comets and asteroids is largely due to their status as debris that remained relatively unchanged from the solar system’s formation process some 4.6 billion years ago.
“The giant outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) were formed from a cluster of billions of comets and the leftovers of this formation process are the comets we see today.
“Similarly, today’s asteroids are the leftover pieces from the initial agglomeration of the inner planets which include Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.
“As early and advanced building blocks of the solar system’s formation process, comets and asteroids offer clues to the chemical mix from which planets formed some 4.6 billion years ago.
“If we want to know the composition of the primordial mixture from which the planets formed, then we need to determine the chemical constituents of the debris remaining from this formation process – the comets and asteroids.”
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