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A small, car-sized asteroid just gave Earth a close shave - Space.com

A small, car-sized asteroid just gave Earth a close shave - Space.com

A small, car-sized asteroid just gave Earth a close shave - Space.com
Apr 12, 2021 48 secs

A newly spotted asteroid about the size of a car flew harmlessly past Earth this morning (April 12).

Astronomers calculated the asteroid, dubbed 2021 GW4, to be about 14 feet (4 meters) across — much too small to survive a journey through Earth's atmosphere if it were ever on course to collide with our planet, according to NASA.

EDT (1300 GMT), the asteroid was about 16,300 miles (26,200 kilometers) away from Earth — less than one-tenth the distance between the Earth and the moon, and quite close as far as asteroid approaches go.

The average distance between the Earth and moon is about 238,855 miles (384,400 km).

Today's visit is as close as the asteroid will come for the next century, according to early NASA calculations of the object's orbit, a nearly two-year loop around the sun.

Lemmon Survey, which is part of a high-powered asteroid discovery project called the Catalina Sky Survey, which has already identified more than 500 asteroids this year, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies!

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