Asteroid 2007 FF1 LIVE – ‘Close approach’ of ‘April Fool’s Day’ space rock to happen

Largest asteroids: Vesta

Vesta is the second-largest asteroid in the main asteroid belt and the biggest official asteroid.

Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovered it in 1807.

Vesta has a diameter of 329 miles and makes up nearly 9 percent of the total mass of all asteroids.

Vesta, like Earth, is spherical and has three layers: crust, mantle, and core.

Largest asteroids: Ceres

Ceres is the biggest asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter and was the first found in 1801, even thought to be a planet at the time.

In the 1850s, it was categorized as an asteroid, but in 2006, it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

While it is no longer classified as an asteroid, it claims the top rank with a diameter of 580 miles.

Ceres is named after the Roman goddess of corn and harvests, and the term cereal comes from the same root.

Ceres took 1,682 Earth days, or 4.6 years, to complete one round around the sun.

Every nine hours, it completes one rotation around its axis.

Largest known asteroids

The largest asteroids in our solar system are chunks of space debris that have shaped the space around them.

This is a list of six of the largest known asteroids:

• Ceres (583.7 miles/ 939.4 kilometers)
• Vesta (326 miles/ 525 kilometers)
• Pallas (318 miles/ 513 kilometers)
• Hygiea (270 miles/ 444 kilometers)
• Interamnia (196.7 miles/ 306 kilometers)
• 52 Europa (188.9 miles/ 306 kilometers)

What are Trojan asteroids?

These asteroids are in the same orbit as a bigger planet, but they don’t crash because they congregate around two specific spots – L4 and L5 Lagrangian points – in the orbit.

The Sun’s and the planet’s gravitational pulls are counterbalanced by a trojan’s proclivity to fly out of orbit.

The Jupiter trojans are the most numerous of the trojan asteroids.

They are estimated to be as abundant as asteroids in the asteroid belt.

There are trojans on Mars and Neptune, and in 2011, NASA reported the finding of an Earth trojan.

What is the Main Asteroid Belt?

The bulk of known asteroids orbits between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, with relatively short orbits.

There are between 1.1 and 1.9million asteroids bigger than one kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter in the belt, as well as millions of smaller ones.

The gravity of freshly created Jupiter stopped the development of planetary bodies in this region early in the solar system’s existence, causing the tiny things to smash with one another, fragmenting them into the asteroids we see today.

What is considered a ‘close approach’?

If an asteroid comes within 4.65million miles of Earth and is over a certain size, it is considered “potentially hazardous” by cautious space agencies.

The asteroid should shoot past from its safe distance at a speed of just under 19,000 miles per hour.

How big was Asteroid 2015 DR215?

At up to 1,607 feet wide, the asteroid was larger than the Empire State Building.

New York’s most iconic building stands at 1,454 feet tall.

Mining asteroids: Is it possible?

The prospect of collecting minerals from asteroids has piqued the interest of NASA, other space organizations, and commercial firms alike, according to Space.com.

One often touted resource that some are interested in harvesting from asteroids and the moon is water, which may be turned into rocket propellant to prevent spaceships from having to launch the weight of their return fuel.

Some people are also interested in extracting metals from asteroids, claiming that the asteroid belt holds enormous financial potential.

Others argue that making this strategy financially sustainable is more challenging.

Did asteroids bring water to Earth? continued

As Space.com reports, according to Nasa’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), “It seems possible that the origin of life on the Earth’s surface could have been first prevented by an enormous flux of impacting comets and asteroids, then a much less intense rain of comets may have deposited the very materials that allowed life to form…