If the 900 meter long Asteroid Ryugu crashes into Earth, will we survive the terrible disaster?
In 2014, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) sent a spacecraft called Hayabusa2 on a unique mission. The spaceship is tasked with landing on an asteroid named Ryugu and collecting rock samples from it. The spacecraft successfully completed its mission in 2020 when it returned with rock samples. In addition to collecting samples, the spacecraft also landed rovers, struck it with projectiles, and spent months observing it closely. And now, after spending some time analyzing the sample, scientists have been able to answer a daunting question. What if asteroid Ryugu hits Earth?
The reason scientists ask this question and are trying to find an answer is because of two factors. Most of the time, when estimating around the impact of a small planet The attack is calculated, only the speed of the asteroid and the angle of attack are used for the calculation. A very important aspect, the composition of asteroids is often overlooked.
But scientists are discovering that not all small planet created equally. For example, Ryugu is a rubble asteroid and not a rock-hard asteroid. That means the way this asteroid will react to the upper atmosphere will be different from how rocky asteroids will react.
The second factor is that scientists cannot analyze and observe up close an asteroid unaffected by the heat and pressure as it enters the atmosphere. This means that data obtained from studying a pristine asteroid could provide really important insight into these space rocks.
Destroyable asteroid Ryugu Earth
The asteroid Ryugu has been measured with a width of about 900 meters. According to NASA, any asteroid 1 km wide can cause a global extinction event. But the answer is a bit hard to find in this case.
“Hayabusa2 succeeded in an experiment in which two fruits weighed 1kg [2.2 pounds] Bullets are launched at a speed of 2 km per second [1.2 miles per second] led to the formation of a crater about 20 meters [66 feet] in diameter. The cohesive strength of the stone means very very low. The density is only slightly higher than Water with very high porosity estimates,” said Professor Satoshi Tanaka of the JAXA Department of Solar System Science speak Space.com.
Such asteroids are known as wreckage asteroids and they will never reach the Earth’s surface in a single piece. They are more likely to break down in the lower atmosphere. What’s interesting is that we saw such an asteroid enter the atmosphere a few years ago. The Chelyabinsk meteorite is a rocky asteroid that exploded in a gas explosion about 35 to 40 kilometers above the ground. It was then calculated that the explosion in the atmosphere released an energy roughly equivalent to 400–500 kilotons of TNT. It was about 33 times more powerful than the explosive force of the nuclear bomb that flattened the city of Hiroshima.
And here is the kicker. The Chelyabinsk meteorite is about 19 meters wide. That was only 2 percent of Ryugu’s size. So if Ryugu had ever hit Earth, the air explosion itself would have been catastrophic enough, let alone all of the asteroid fragments that would later bombard the planet’s surface.
Fortunately for us, it is estimated that it is unlikely that this particular asteroid will hit our planet in the near future.
