2020TN3 is expected to be three times as big as the Statue of Liberty in New York
A total of three Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) are expected to pass by the planet this Tuesday in varying times, the same day when Mars will be in opposition. One of the NEAs to zip by is three times the size of the Statue of Liberty in New York.
The first of the three to zip past Earth on Tuesday is also the largest. 2020TN3 is about 278 ft in diameter and is expected to zip by early in the morning, at 5:12 a.m. EDT. The giant asteroid will be three times the size of the Statue of Liberty. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies claims the NEA will be flying by
An extraterrestrial body glowing as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere
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In the morning of June 30, 1908, the ground trembled in Central Siberia, and a series of flying fireballs, causing a “frightful sound” of explosions, were observed in the sky above the Stony Tunguska River. Strange glowing clouds, colorful sunsets, and a weak luminescence in the night were reported as far as Europe.
Likely many thousand people in a radius of 1.500 kilometers (or 900 miles) observed the Tunguska Event. However, due to the remoteness of the affected area, eyewitness testimonies were collected only more than half of a century after the event, and most were second-hand oral accounts. In 2008, unpublished material collected by Russian ethnographer Sev’yan Vainshtein resurfaced, including some first-hand accounts of the event.
Despite its notoriety in pop-culture, hard scientific data covering the Tunguska Event is sparse. Since 1928 more than forty expeditions explored
Asteroid Ryugu was somewhat of a mystery when astronomers first spotted it back in 1999. But we now know that the spinning-top-shaped body floating some 217 million miles from Earth is a loose assemblage of fragments from a collision between two asteroids held together by their aggregate gravity. Scientists estimate Ryugu formed between 10 million to 20 million years ago—practically yesterday in cosmic time, but how the asteroid came to be has remained largely unknown. Now, new research lays bare Ryugu’s recent violent past.
To uncover secrets about this rubble-pile asteroid, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) dispatched the fridge-sized spacecraft Hayabusa2 to Ryugu. For the study, published Monday in Nature Astronomy, scientists used
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![a close up of a crater: Ryugu is approximately 0.6 miles wide and weighs 450 million tons.](https://www.msn.com/{"default":{"load":"default","w":"27","h":"20","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB19q3mt.img?h=203&w=270&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"}})
![a close up of a crater: Ryugu is approximately 0.6 miles wide and weighs 450 million tons.](https://www.msn.com/{"default":{"load":"default","w":"32","h":"24","src":"//img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/BB19qkb8.img?h=240&w=320&m=6&q=60&o=f&l=f"}})