An asteroid roughly the size of a minivan will skim past Earth on Thursday night, coming closer than some satellites to the Earth’s surface, NASA reported on Wednesday.
NASA calculated that the asteroid will make one of the closest approaches to Earth ever recorded, but will safely miss the planet.
The space agency’s impact hazard assessment system, called Scout, quickly ruled out a strike, said its developer, Davide Farnocchia, an engineer at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
“But despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” Farnocchia said in a statement. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”…