The Nation - News from Aug. 25, 1989

A mile-wide chunk of space rock passed within about 2.5 million miles of Earth, the second nearest approach of a large asteroid this year. “People living on the Earth are in no danger from it,” said Brian Marsden of the International Astronomical Union’s Central Bureau in Cambridge, Mass. Eleanor Helin, an astronomer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discovered the asteroid, named 1989 PB and moving many thousand miles per hour, on Aug. 9 in film studies taken that day on a telescope at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego. Last March, 1989 FC passed within 460,000 miles of the Earth, believed to be the closest asteroid pass in the records of astronomy.