The asteroid is set to fly past Earth safely, at 27 times the speed of sound.
A"potentially hazardous" asteroid the size of a blue whale is set to zip past Earth on Friday , according to NASA .
At its closest approach, the asteroid — traveling at around than 27 times the speed of sound — will come within about 2.67 million miles of Earth, a little more than eight times the average distance between Earth and the moon. By cosmic standards, this is a tiny margin.NASA flags any space object that comes within 120 million miles of Earth as a"near-Earth object" and any fast-moving object within 4.65 million miles is categorized as"potentially hazardous.
NASA has estimated the trajectories of all the near-Earth objects beyond the end of the century, and the good news is that Earth faces no known danger from an apocalyptic asteroid collision for at least the next 100 years, according to NASA.—What happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into Earth?But this doesn’t mean that space watchers think they should stop looking.
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