NASA asteroid tracker: LOOK OUT for 130FT asteroid barreling on Earth approach TOMORROW
AN ASTEROID at four times the length of a London double-decker bus will skim the Earth tomorrow afternoon, NASA's asteroid trackers have revealed.
The imposing asteroid, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2016 CO246, will pass Earth on a so-called “Earth Close Approach”. NASA’s astronomers predict the asteroid will cross paths with Earth’s orbit on Friday, February 22. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have narrowed tomorrow's passage down to 3.56pm GMT. NASA’s JPL further estimates the asteroid measures somewhere in the range of 59ft to 127.9ft (18m to 39m) across.
This means at the upper end of NASA’s estimate is an asteroid about two times as long as a standard bowling lane.
The asteroid is also believed to be about 19.5-times the length of a Queen Size Bed and 9.5-times longer than a Volkswagen Beetle car.
Towards the other end of the scale, a 59ft-long asteroid is almost three times as tall as an average giraffe.
A similarly sized asteroid injured more than 1,000 people in 2013 when it entered the atmosphere undetected and exploded over Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia.
The Chelyabinsk Meteor, as it was nicknamed, only measured around 65.6ft (20m) in diameter but blew up with 30-times the force of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.
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The resulting arblast damaged more than 7,000 buildings in the region, pummelling people with shrapnel of broken glass from blown out windows.
Near-Earth Objects can occasionally approach close to Earth
According to the European Space Agency (ESA), asteroids this big are some of the most populous and most worrying space rocks in the solar system.
The ESA said: “The main challenge stems from the population of middle-size objects, ranging from tens to hundreds of metres in diameter.
“There are a lot of these asteroids, and most have not been spotted yet. Any impact from one of these could really do damage to a city or a populated area.
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“But if they are discovered early enough, their point of impact could be estimated with a good degree of accuracy, and measures could be taken to protect people."
Today, astronomers know of no asteroid directly barrelling towards our home planet but the search for rogue asteroids continues.
Thankfully, NASA does not expect Asteroid CO246 to deviate from its orbit enough to cause similar damage this Friday.
The giant asteroid is a so-called “Near-Earth Object” (NEO), meaning it occasionally cuts into the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
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When this happens, NEOs sometimes come dangerously close to the planet, enough to warrant interest from NASA’s asteroid-tracking systems.
This week, however, Asteroid CO246 is expected to miss the Earth by nearly four million miles in space.
NASA explained: “As they orbit the Sun, Near-Earth Objects can occasionally approach close to Earth.
“Note that a ‘close’ passage astronomically can be very far away in human terms: millions or even tens of millions of kilometres.”
On Friday, the asteroid will approach the Earth from a distance of approximately 0.04051 astronomical units (au).
One astronomical unit is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun and measures about 93 million miles (149.6 million km).
NASA expects Asteroid CO246 to cut this down considerably to just 3.765 million miles (6.06 million km).
This is the equivalent of 15.77 Lunar Distances (LD) or 15.77-times the distance from Earth to the Moon.