The monster asteroid hurtling through the void of space towards Earth is feared to make a possible brush with Earth between 2023 and 2117. NASA’s asteroid-tracking Sentry systems have calculated at least 62 dates on which the asteroid could potentially make contact. The first potential cataclysm date falls as early as August 8, 2023, followed by more encounters on August 3, 2024, and August 1, 2025. The last date on which the asteroid could veer off into our planet falls on July 24, 2117.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, estimates this rogue asteroid measures somewhere in the range of 698.8ft (213m).
Space rocks this big could claim millions of lives if they ever struck the Earth with full force.
The exact amount of impact energy released by Asteroid LF16 would vary greatly, depending on its actual size, composition and speed.
NASA roughly estimates the asteroid weighs in at around 1.3e+10kg or 13 billion tonnes.
And the asteroid is believed to be speeding through the vacuum of space at speeds of more than 33,844mph, meaning it covers 15.3km of distance every one second.
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These estimates point towards a kinetic energy of 5.6e+2Mt or 560 megatons of TNT released upon impact – 11.2-times more than the Soviet Tsar Bomba.
The Tsar Bomba hydrogen bomb is the single most powerful nuclear device invented by mankind but it pales when compared to LF16.
The Russian bomb packed a yield of 50 megatons of TNT, producing a five-mile-wide (eight km) fireball and a mushroom cloud 40-miles (64km) high.
Shockwaves from the bomb’s one and only test in 1961, blew out windows up to 560 miles (900km) from ground zero.
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With these terrifying figures in mind, the good news is the probability of LF16 clipping the Earth by the end of the century is incredibly low.
The overall odds of the space rock impacting Earth stands at about one in 30,000,000.
This is a 0.0000033 percent chance of impact, or in other words, a 99.9999967 percent chance of a miss.
And the odds of LF16 barreling straight into the Earth in August 2023 are even smaller – one in 370,000,000 or 0.00000027 percent chance of a hit.
NASA’s Sentry system keeps track of asteroids like this to give the world adequate warning and preparation time if one were to hit the Earth.
The US space agency said: “Sentry is a highly automated collision monitoring system that continually scans the most current asteroid catalogue for possibilities of future impact with Earth over the next 100 years.
“Whenever a potential impact is detected it will be analysed and the results immediately published here, except in unusual cases where we seek independent confirmation.”
NASA added it is normal for asteroid threats to be removed from Sentry’s list once additional observations create a better image of the space rock’s final trajectory.