Asteroid 2002 AJ129 approaches the planet at more than 120,000 km / h. At 6:30 it will be the time when it is closest.
Asteroid 2002 AJ129 approaches Earth at more than 120,000 kilometers per hour and today at 6:30 pm it will be the time when it is closest to the planet.
It has a diameter of between 800 and 1,100 meters, and equals or exceeds the tallest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa of Dubai (United Arab Emirates), 828 meters.
The good news is that the risk of impact is zero. At the time closest to Earth this will be 4.2 million kilometers, about ten times the distance that separates us from the Moon.
The 2002 AJ129 was discovered in 2002 from the Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii (United States), and has been classified as a "potentially dangerous asteroid". However, that does not mean that it will impact our planet in the near future.
"We have been monitoring this asteroid for more than fourteen years and we know its orbit in detail," said Paul Chodas, coordinator of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), in a statement. disseminated by the space agency on January 20.
"Our calculations indicate that asteroid 2002 AJ129 has no chance -or- to collide with Earth on February 4 or at any time in the next hundred years," he added.
It is not the first time that the asteroid 2002 AJ129 visits us or the time that has most approached us. In February of 1904 it happened to 3.1 million kilometers of the Earth, also according to data of the NASA.