The end is nigh, folks. This week, we have not one, not two, but three city-killer asteroids possibly on the way to Earth, and they’re coming in rapid succession. Okay, so that’s a bit of an overreaction! But let’s examine exactly what’s going on here.
Venus has a small collection of asteroids in its orbit. Although our neighbouring planet is safe from them, we, on the other hand, may not be. There is little to no chance of them hitting Venus, but three of them in particular could break orbit and pound into the Earth at some point in the future.
The shaky orbit of the three asteroids is being studied. However, it’s particularly difficult to observe them due to the glare of the sun. But some progress has been made.
The asteroids are known as co-orbital, which means they orbit two planets. We share their orbit with Venus. Simulations run by Valerio Carruba of São Paulo University in Brazil show that three of the twenty known asteroids could, one day, hit Earth.
“Co-orbital status protects these asteroids from close approaches to Venus, but it does not protect them from encountering Earth,” he said in a study.
Zero Warning Before Asteroids Strike Earth
The blind spot created by the sun means that these asteroids are very difficult to observe. If they broke their current orbit due to even a slight gravitational shift, we would only have a few weeks of warning. This is significantly shorter than the years of warning we usually have.
The three asteroids, being referred to as 2020 SB, 524522, and 2020 CL1, aren’t small either. They’re not the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs, but they’re big enough to obliterate a large city. The three measure around 330 and 1,300 feet in diameter.
These asteroids, were they to hit Earth, would leave a two-mile-wide crater and create around 1390 megatons of explosion. To put that in perspective, the largest nuclear bomb ever created, the Russian Tsar bomb, is only 50 megatons.
The scientists are scrambling for ways to keep the asteroids under supervision, to ensure they don’t hit Earth. “We believe that only a dedicated observational campaign from a space-based mission near Venus could potentially map and discover all the still ‘invisible’ PHA [potentially hazardous asteroids] among Venus’ co-orbital asteroids.”
Time to start digging that bunker.