An asteroid the size of a delivery truck will whip past Earth on Thursday night, one of the closest such encounters ever recorded.
NASA said Wednesday that this newly discovered asteroid will zoom 2,200 miles above the southern tip of South America. That's 10 times closer than the bevy of communication satellites circling overhead.Even if the space rock came a lot closer, scientists said most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, with some of the bigger pieces possibly falling as meteorites.
“But despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” Farnocchia said in a statement. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”
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