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03-09-2013, 01:37 AM
10:50 PM ET
Asteroid to fly past Earth this weekend (http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/07/asteroid-to-fly-past-earth-this-weekend/) By Melissa Gray, CNN
An asteroid the size of a city block will pass by Earth this weekend, but have no fear: There's no danger of it hitting our planet.
The 80-meter (262 feet) wide asteroid makes its closest approach to Earth on Saturday afternoon in the United States. It will be about 975,000 kilometers (604,500 miles) away, said Don Yeomans, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jpl/home/index.html) in California. That's about 2 1/2 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.
"It's a pretty good size, but it's not getting that close, at least by recent standards," Yeomans said.
The asteroid was only discovered Sunday because search telescopes can't find objects of that size until they get close.
Read the rest here:
http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/07/asteroid-to-fly-past-earth-this-weekend/?hpt=hp_t3
Asteroid to fly past Earth this weekend (http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/07/asteroid-to-fly-past-earth-this-weekend/) By Melissa Gray, CNN
An asteroid the size of a city block will pass by Earth this weekend, but have no fear: There's no danger of it hitting our planet.
The 80-meter (262 feet) wide asteroid makes its closest approach to Earth on Saturday afternoon in the United States. It will be about 975,000 kilometers (604,500 miles) away, said Don Yeomans, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jpl/home/index.html) in California. That's about 2 1/2 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.
"It's a pretty good size, but it's not getting that close, at least by recent standards," Yeomans said.
The asteroid was only discovered Sunday because search telescopes can't find objects of that size until they get close.
Read the rest here:
http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2013/03/07/asteroid-to-fly-past-earth-this-weekend/?hpt=hp_t3