On July 11, a heavenly body with a diameter of 260 meters will pass by Earth. Its symbol is MC4. The asteroid will pass along the outer side of the Earth's orbit, but its maximum approach to our planet will be 20 times less than the distance to the Moon. By cosmic standards this is very close.
If there is a collision, such a cosmic messenger will not destroy our planet, of course, but the explosion will be most powerful, many forms of life on the planet will disappear. So once dinosaurs and ammonites that appeared in the seas long before dinosaurs and survived many cataclysms. So, according to American scientists, mammoths were extinct, which were too many, so that a few people at that time could all eat.
The probability that the collision will occur is. The flight speed of SM4 is 74 thousand kilometers per hour.
If humanity does not die in the next five years, NASA specialists will organize a full-fledged protection from DART asteroids. Recently, a large-scale project was announced that involves the deviation with the help of a kinetic impact flying to the Earth meteorites. Protection will be "tested" on the asteroid Didimos, which in 5-7 years will approach the Earth.
In the meantime, we meet MC4. It is smaller than that 65 million years ago caused the extinction of dinosaurs (about 10 kilometers). While approximately only the date of the meeting is known, time is unknown.
NASA staff observed the fall to the moon of a meteor weighing about 40 kilograms. This happened on May 17, 2013. It was possible to see the explosion even without special equipment. The power was 5 tons in trotyl equivalent.
Experts calculated that the speed of the meteorite was 90 thousand kilometers per hour. The observed explosion was the most powerful in the whole history of observations (the last 8 years).
This explosion is far from Chelyabinsk meteorite. Its diameter was 17 meters, and the mass of 10 thousand tons. On May 15, it collapsed into separate fragments that fell in Bashkiria, Kurgan, Sverdlovsk, Tyumen and Chelyabinsk regions. It was the largest meteorite that fell to Earth since 1908, when the Tunguska meteorite collapsed in Siberia.