Amateur astronomer from Crimea discoves potentially dangerous asteroid for Earth

Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov has discovered an asteroid that is potentially dangerous for the Earth, Russian TASS reports.

"Confirmation received. This is a near-Earth and potentially dangerous asteroid. Since the beginning of the year, about 60 asteroids of this size have been discovered in the world, one of them was discovered by me. They continue to follow it," said Gennady Borisov.

This asteroid has a diameter of about 200 m. Gennady Borisov discovered it in March, and confirmation came from Harvard, where the Minor Planet Center is located. At the moment, about 50 observatories in the world are engaged in the search for asteroids, but only five of them have discovered new celestial bodies this year.

"They [asteroids] move at a distance 50 times greater than the distance separating the Earth from the Moon, but still they are considered potentially dangerous," added Borisov.

The largest near-Earth asteroids, more than a kilometer in diameter, could cause catastrophic changes in a collision with Earth, even destroying human civilization. And smaller objects with a diameter of 140 m to 1 km can cause regional disasters in the event of a collision with the Earth, destroy up to entire continents and lead to the death of hundreds of millions of people.

To avoid such scenarios, scientists constantly study the universe in order to know in advance about potentially dangerous asteroids. In the framework of protecting the Earth from such asteroids, NASA successfully implemented the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission in the fall of 2022.

As part of this, the DART probe hit Dimorph orbiting Didymus to see if it was possible to artificially alter the asteroid's orbit. The results of the mission exceeded the expectations of scientists. According to them, the collision should have changed the constellation's rotation time by about 73 seconds, but in fact it changed it by 32 minutes, and now one complete rotation takes 11 hours and 23 minutes.