NASA asteroid tracker: Giant 650FT asteroid is headed for Earth approach THIS WEEKEND

The asteroid, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2019 BF1, is heading towards a so-called “Earth Close Approach”. The asteroid’s daunting trajectory will see it skim our home planet in the wee morning hours of Sunday, February 24. NASA’s asteroid experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, expect BF1 to arrive around 3.21am GMT. When this happens, the giant asteroid will cut into the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and fly by at breakneck speeds.

According to NASA’s calculations, the asteroid measures somewhere in the range of 288.7ft to 656.2ft (88m to 200m) across.

An asteroid this big is about 24-times the length of a London double-decker bus and is 50-times as long as a Volkswagen Beetle car.

Placed on the Earth, the space rock would tower over Big Ben’s clock tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Statue of Liberty.

Even at the lower end of NASA’s estimate, the imposing asteroid is still about two-thirds as tall as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

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If the asteroid struck a heavy populated area somewhere on Earth, the loss of life and destruction could be unimaginable.

Thankfully, the asteroid will not close in on Earth enough to strike our home world with brute force.

Asteroid BF1 is a so-called “Near-Earth Object” (NEO), meaning it cuts across the Earth’s orbit at times.

But this does not immediately spell any danger for the people of our home planet.

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NASA said: “Near-Earth objects are asteroids or comets of sizes ranging from metres to tens of kilometres that orbit the Sun and whose orbits come close to that of Earth’s.

“Of the more than 600,000 known asteroids in our Solar System, more than 16,000 are NEOs.

“An example of a NEO is 25143 Itokawa, an object about 300m in diameter that was visited by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa in 2005.”

Even at their closest, NEOs can miss the Earth by hundreds of thousands if not millions of miles.

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This might seem like incredible distances to humans but in space, the distances are practically irrelevant on the grander scale of the cosmos.

On Sunday, Asteroid BF1 is expected to approach the Earth from a distance of about 0.02871 astronomical units (au).

One au translates into about 93 million miles (149.6 million km), which is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Asteroid BF1 will trim this down considerably in the next three days, swinging past the Earth from a distance of 2.67 million miles (4.3 million miles).

This is the equivalent of 11.17 Lunar Distances (LD) or 11.17-times the distance from Earth to the Moon.

NASA’s asteroid trackers first observed BF1 on December 17, 2018, and have followed its trajectory ever since.

The space agency’s close approach tables show BF1 will fly past the Earth again this year on July 10, around 2.48pm GMT.

On January 12, 2075, the asteroid will also closely approach Mars and NASA believes BF1 first visited Earth on June 25, 1902.

source: express.co.uk