Supersonic asteroid 10 times faster than bullet passes Earth

New York: A small supersonic asteroid, travelling at ten times the speed of a bullet passed by Earth recently.

The asteroid has been given the designation 2022 QC7 and it is not too big, with a width ranging from just 16 metres to 36 metres, according to the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

For comparison, 36 metres is around half the wingspan of a Boeing 767 jet plane, the report said.

But asteroid 2022 QC7 that came barreling in Earth’s direction at a speed of around 9.10 kilometres per second, or 32,760 kilometres per hour. NASA Earth supersonic asteroid

To put that in perspective, that is about 10 times as fast as an average 5.56 x 45 mm NATO rifle bullet and is the equivalent of close to 27 times the speed of sound. NASA Earth supersonic asteroid

Considering the Moon orbits the Earth at an average distance of 384,000 kilometres, this is much farther — albeit not too far on a cosmic scale. However, even if asteroid 2022 QC7 did manage to hit the Earth, it would not do much.

According to research from the Davidson Institute of Science, the educational arm of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, an asteroid, 140 metres in diameter or more, would release an amount of energy at least a thousand times greater than that released by the first atomic bomb if it impacted Earth.

Source: Agencies