The largest asteroid to pass on Earth in 2021 is expected to hit the planet on March 21st.
It will be compared in size to the Golden Gate Bridge, distance 231937 or 2001 FO32, within 2,016,351 km of the Earth in 2021.
Depending on its light exposure, the 2001 FO32 is approximately between 0.767 to 1.714 kilometers in diameter. At the helm of Congress, NASA has supported an earth-based program to identify NEOs larger than one kilometer in diameter.
NASA’s 2001 Jet Deployment Laboratory has classified FO32 as a “potentially dangerous asteroid” due to its proximity to Earth.
Potentially Dangerous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s ability to perform near-threat approaches on Earth.
The high explosion of a body 80 meters in diameter above Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908 flattened trees over a wide area. A different effect of this scale could flatten a modern city, with deaths in the millions.
Organizations larger than about 100 meters in size cause ground-level explosions in the giga-ton range, or billions of tons. Such effects would wreak havoc on entire nations. There is around a 1 per cent chance that such an impact will occur in the next century.
Assessment of the Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) population down to 100-meter scales, as part of an organized schedule of small groups of the solar system, has been identified as a high priority for NASA’s Solar System Monitoring program. .
Extracts from existing studies suggest that the number of PHAs greater than 100 m is on the order of between 10,000 and 20,000.