Asteroid 2006 QV89 set to fly past Earth soon, experts fear massive destruction on collision

It looks like space is furious on us as another deadly asteroid is approaching towards Earth. Don’t believe us? The European Space Agency (ESA) is tracking an asteroid named as ‘2006 QV89’, which measures 40 metres in diameter, is set to fly past the Earth in September.

According to a report in metro.co.uk, the ESA stated that there’s only around a 1-in-7000 chance that the massive chunk of rock will collide with us. Asteroid 2006 QV89 will fly harmlessly past at a distance of 4.2 million miles away on September 9. As it is close enough to the Earth, the ESA has included the asteroid in the ‘Risk List’.

The space agency describes the ‘Risk List’ as a catalogue of all objects for which a non-zero impact probability has been detected. It is to be noted that the asteroid 2006 QV89 if hits, would be more powerful than the largest meteor strike yet recorded.

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In the year 2013, a 20 metre asteroid exploded over Chelyabinsk in Russia. That was 440 kilotons and left 1,500 people injured, mostly from glass flying out of smashed windows.

It is worth mentioning here that on December 18 last year, a large meteoroid was exploded over the Bering Sea, however, it went unnoticed due to the remote location. According to the NASA, the explosion of meteoroid unleashed around 173 kilotons of energy, more than 10 times that of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima in World War II.

NASA, in the meantime, classifies any rock that comes within 30 million miles of our planet as a ‘Near-Earth Object’. NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine warned that large asteroid impacts are a very real threat to our planet. “These events are not rare. They happen. The fact is that we’ve had three such events in the last 100 years,’ he added.

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