NATIONAL BRIEFING / NATIONWIDE
Times Wire Reports
An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth.
The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles away when it zipped by Monday, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge reported.
That is just twice as high as the orbits of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the moon.
“This was pretty darn close,” astronomer Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said.
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