Gigantic Three asteroids will skim past Earth TODAY in close flyby travelling at 34420 miles per hour. A massive asteroid believed to measure 280ftin diameter is set to fly past Earth this afternoon at a dizzying speed of 30,422 miles per hour.
The asteroid, dubbed 2013 MD8, is expected to skim past Earth at just over 3 million miles away, or about 13 times the distance between Earth and the moon, at 12:55pm (ET) on Tuesday.
The huge space rock is expected to make a ‘close approach’ to Earth, but its trajectory should see it soar safely by.
NASA estimates Asteroid RM7 came within 2.78 lunar distances of the planet – nearly three times the distance to the Moon or 663,704.46 miles (1.06 million km). The asteroid flew by at breakneck speeds of around 38877.9 mph (17.38 km per second)
The massive asteroid, dubbed 2013 MD8, will soar past Earth at a dizzying speed of 30,422 miles per hour. It falls under the category established by NASA of near-earth-objects
NASA considers an asteroid to be ‘hazardous’ if they come within 4,600,000 miles of our planet.
Asteroid MD8 falls under the category of a ‘near-earth object’ (NEO), which NASA describes as all asteroids and comets that orbit within 30 million miles of Earth.
‘No human in the past 1000 years is known to have been killed by a meteorite or by the effects of one impacting,’ scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory explained.
‘NASA knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small.
‘In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years,’ they continued.
