Though it is known as a “potentially hazardous asteroid” because of its relatively close passes, the object will only come within 3.5 million kilometres – so distant that it will not be visible with the naked eye and poses no immediate danger.
The asteroid, named 2017 AE3, is travelling fast. It will fly past at 20 kilometres per second, before flying off into space – not to return until 2109.
It is somewhere between 116 and 259 metres across. That is relatively small for an asteroid, though at roughly the size of a bus it is still large enough to make a significant impact if it did crash into Earth.
Nasa tracks a vast amount of such objects, which it calls “near-Earth objects” or NEOs. Anything that comes within 120 million miles of Earth – “near” only in the terms of the solar system – is given the designation.
from: Independent
images: same
