Asteroid Narrowly Misses Hitting Earth
An asteroid missed Earth, passing by at less than half the distance to the moon, an Australian-based astronomer said Thursday.
The asteroid, estimated to be up to 22 yards across and traveling at 43,000 m.p.h., passed by Tuesday between 100,000 and 112,000 miles away.
“In the cosmic scale of things, that really is right in our back yard,” Duncan Steel of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney said in a radio interview.
Steel said the asteroid was one of only three observed to pass the Earth that closely in the last three years.
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