On the evening of Monday, March 14, an asteroid will graze Earth. At 13 meters long, asteroid 2022 ES3 is, for comparison, about the size of a bus or twice the size of a giraffe.
It is around 7:30 p.m. French time that asteroid 2022 ES3 should pass 7 million kilometers from our planet. A distance which represents approximately 19 times that which separates the Earth from the Moon. While that doesn’t seem close at all on a human scale, things are quite different when viewed from space. For scientists, this distance is indeed very close, explains in particular the specialized site Space.com.
2022 ES3 was first spotted on March 7 by the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, USA. The institution then shared all the information it could obtain about it in open access.
If the observations are made in very precise ways, they are sometimes made too late and the object, asteroid or other, brushes against us in all discretion. This had also been the case for another asteroid in November 2021.
A phenomenon that can be followed live
But this time, all space lovers or the simply curious can follow 2022 ES3 live. The Virtual Telescope project, a community bringing together thousands of enthusiasts, has thus opened a dedicated YouTube page.
It only remains to hope that the clouds are not too present to be able to admire the spectacle. Finally, if some asteroids can cause significant damage if they crash into Earth, this is not the case with 2022 ES3 which is not classified as a potentially dangerous asteroid. The reason is that it does not have a sufficient diameter to be.
NASA considers a space rock dangerous if its diameter is equal to or greater than 150 meters and if its orbit takes it to less than 7.4 million kilometers from Earth. Let a distance equal approximately 19.5 times the distance to the Moon.