3200 Phaethon is a dangerous near-Earth asteroid (NEA) with a large orbital eccentricity, small perihelion distance, and connection to the Geminid meteor shower. Phaethon is classified as a B-type asteroid (\cite{Green_1985}; Binzel et al. 2001, 2004; Bus and Binzel 2002) which is a category of C-complex asteroids. B-type asteroids are characterized by the presence of volatile-rich remnants from the early Solar System. Phaethon has been identified as a “wet” asteroid with frozen H2O, likely an icy core, hydrated silicates (which is when water is added to a crystal structure turning it in a “hydrate” or wet mineral), and organic matter using spectral data, in line with other B-type asteroids in the Asteroid Belt (Licandro et al. 2007; Rivkin and Emery 2010; Campins et al. 2010). Phaethon is 5 km in diameter (Hanus et al. 2016) and has a perihelion distance of 0.1399 AU (Devogele et al. 2018). According to NASA, if it were to hit earth, it would, at a minimum, destroy an area 2.5 times the size of LAX. While Phaethon is smaller than the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs by a factor of 2, it will still do devastating damage.
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