Alert! NASA says hazardous asteroid set to come dangerously close to Earth today

There is a cause to be worried as NASA has discovered an asteroid which is speeding towards Earth and will come dangerously close to the planet. This space rock is hurtling towards the planet and could make its close approach with Earth today. It has been classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office due to the close proximity of its encounter with Earth.

So, are we safe from this asteroid? Here's what NASA said.

Asteroid 2022 WO10 key details

NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office has red-flagged an asteroid named Asteroid 2022 WO10 due to its extremely close approach to the planet. The 29-foot asteroid will make its closest approach to Earth today, December 8 at a distance of 1.9 million kilometers per hour. It is already on its way towards the planet travelling at a speed of nearly 17108 kilometers per hour, which is more than the speed of a hypersonic ballistic missile!

According to NASA, the Asteroid 2022 WO10 belongs to the Apollo group of asteroids, which are a group of Near-Earth asteroids named after the humongous 1862 Apollo asteroid, discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth in the 1930s.

How is an Asteroid Orbit Calculated?

An asteroid's orbit is computed by finding the elliptical path about the sun that best fits the available observations of the object using various space and ground-based telescopes such as NASA’s NEOWISE telescope and its brand-new Sentry II algorithm. That is, the object's computed path about the sun is adjusted until the predictions of where the asteroid should have appeared in the sky at several observed times match the positions where the object was actually observed to be at those same time.