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21st Mar 2019

A giant asteroid will pass by earth on Friday morning

Alan Loughnane

Meteor earth

NASA said the meteor will pass unusually close to earth.

A large meteor will pass by earth on Friday in what will be the closest passing of a meteor this size in over 112 years.

NASA expects the asteroid to past by earth just before 2am GMT in the early hours of Friday morning, 22 March.

The asteroid will skim the Earth closer than the Moon on a trajectory dubbed by NASA a “Close Earth Approach”.

It’s expected to fly past our planet at a speed of 5.37 km/s at a distance of 305,179 km, which is 80,000km less than our distance from the Moon.

According to NASA’s asteroids experts at the California based Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) the asteroid was first encountered on March 9 this year.

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Topics:

NASA,World News