An enormous asteroid will sail safely past Earth this weekend.
Data from NASA’s Center for Near Earth Studies (CNEOS) shows that the rock, known as 2015 NU13, is between 1,017 and 2,230 feet in diameter.
At the top of this estimate, the asteroid would be nearly twice the size of the Empire State Building in New York.
It would also be slightly shorter than the tallest building in the world – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which is about 2723 feet.
2015 NU13 will approach the nearest earth on January 9 at 04:16 ET, when it will come within 3.5 million miles of the earth.
This is equivalent to about 15 times the average distance between the earth and the moon, which in astronomical terms is relatively close.
Either way, astronomers know the orbit of this object well and there is no chance that it will hit the earth during this approach.
As the space rock flies past our planet, it will move about 33,700 miles per hour, which is about 45 times as fast at the speed of sound.
2015 NU13 is according to the CNEOS one of the top 100 largest space rocks that will take a close approach to Earth within the next 365 days.
The largest object planned to follow a close approach over this period is a space rock known as 231937 (2001 FO32), which is estimated to measure up to 1.05 miles in diameter.
This object will come close to Earth on March 21 and come within about 1.25 million miles of our planet.
Both 2015 NU13 and 2001 FO32 are classified as “near-earth objects”, or NEOs, as they can pass within about 30 million miles of the earth’s orbit.
Some NEOs are also rated as “potentially dangerous” if they are estimated to measure more than 460 feet in diameter and have orbits that will bring them within 4.7 million miles of Earth’s orbit.
Scientists have currently identified about 25,000 NEOs, the vast majority of which are asteroids. According to NASA, no known asteroid poses a significant risk of colliding with Earth in the next century.
“By constantly searching for asteroids, we expect to eventually find the majority of the hundred-meter asteroids over time, as they pass many years or decades ahead of us,” CNEOS director Paul Chodas said earlier. Newsweek.
“We already have more than 95 percent of the very large asteroids (1 kilometer or larger) and we know that none of them have the chance to affect the next century.”
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