A huge space rock estimated to be more than one kilometre wide is heading towards Earth, Nasa has confirmed. The asteroid is called 2002 AJ129 and is between 500 and 1300 metres across, meaning it would easily wipe out a city if it whacked into our planet. If the space rock plunged into the sea, it would cause a gigantic tsunami with the potential to wreak destruction on a truly global scale. It’s likely the dust and debris thrown up by the impact would linger in the air for years, causing crops to fail and potentially starving millions of people in a ‘mini Ice age‘. Thank goodness, then, that Nasa has been closely observing the huge object and knows exactly whether it’s going to hit us or not.
Paul Chodas, manager of Nasa’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: ‘We have been tracking this asteroid for over 14 years and know its orbit very accurately. ‘Our calculations indicate that asteroid 2002 AJ129 has no chance – zero – of colliding with Earth on Feb. 4 or any time over the next 100 years.’ It will speed past at 10 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, which is about 2.6 million miles. So what would happen if it did plough into Earth? Charles Bardeen, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, previously said a 1km-wide space rock would ‘a very severe global impact’ – although it probably wouldn’t wipe out humanity. An asteroid the size of 2002 AJ129 would throw vast amounts of dust and ash into the air and also cause wildfires to erupt, sending even more soot and smoke into the atmosphere. In the worst case scenario, the debris could linger in the atmosphere for up to 10 years and block out sunlight, causing temperatures to drop and crops to fail. ‘These would not be pleasant times,’ Bardeen said, according to Space.com.
Last year Robert Walker, an inventor, computer programmer and astronomer, made some terrifying predictions about what would happen if an asteroid of just 200 metres across hit Earth. He said anyone unlucky enough to be near the impact site would be killed, but our species would survive. In a blog post for Science 20, he said millions of people would be killed by a tsunami if it smashed into the sea near a major city. He continued: ‘If it hit on land it would create a large crater (as a rough guide the crater is ten times the diameter of the asteroid) and that could kill millions of people if it landed in or near a city. If it landed in a remote place the effects could be minimal – and much of the land area to this day is still desert or ice or uninhabited by humans.’ Whilst this would obviously be a major disaster, it would not throw up enough debris and dust to cause an ‘impact winter’ which blocks out the sun across the world and causes a mass die-off of plants, animals and humans. ‘It would not have any long-term global effects,’ he added.