Well damn, after 2021 was going so well, it decides to hurl an asteroid our way like a bowling ball. Here we are, just little pins, waiting for the creatures in the void to celebrate their strike with one of those weird little AMF Bowling videos.
Yes, it’s true, an asteroid roughly the size of the Sydney Opera House is going to be heading straight for Earth. Will it hit us? Of course it won’t, but it’s still interesting to talk about why NASA has labelled it a NEO (Near Earth Object.)
The little rock guy, who is really just doing his best floating through the vast infinity of space, has been named 2021 AG7, and although he is heading straight towards Earth, there will be no contact. So yeah, it’s a real shame for anyone who was expecting to use the obliteration of the planet as an excuse to get out of work next week.
In fact, the asteroid will be pretty far from the Earth at its closest distance. You know how the moon is like, really far from us? Well, our buddy AG7 is going to be the same distance from Earth, but times that by eleven.
2021 AG7 is currently moving at 16.6km per second, which is unbelievably speedy. I’m talking real zoom hours. To put that into perspective, the fastest creature on planet Earth is the peregrine falcon, which travels at 389km per hour. Our asteroid friend can do 389kms in roughly 24 seconds, and can probably also wipe out every peregrine falcon to ever take flight, if it chose to do so.
Objects have been flying past Earth since time immemorial, and very rarely do they ever bump into us to say hi. Really, it’s kind of rude of them, but if there was ever a year for rocks from space to squish us all into oblivion, it was 2020, where pretty much everything went wrong.
So the good news is that we won’t be getting slammed into the next dimension by a cute little rock from space. But hey, making we can make some funny memes about this moment and laugh about it until next month.
