Watch Live: City-Block-Size Asteroid Comes Out of Nowhere and Flies By Earth
BY ADAM MANN
An asteroid roughly 64 to 140 meters wide — about the size of a city block — will be zipping past the Earth today, and you can watch a live show (above) of the event from the Slooh Space Camera consortium starting at 12:45 p.m. Pacific/3:45 p.m. Eastern.
The asteroid, officially called 2013 ET, was discovered only on Mar. 3. It will be coming within less than 1 million km of our planet, about 2.5 times the distance between the moon and the Earth. This distance means the object poses no danger but is a very close shave astronomically speaking.
The asteroid’s close approach barely a week after its discovery follows a busy month for things falling from the sky. On Feb. 15, the largest meteor to hit the Earth in a century exploded over Russia just as another asteroid made a record-setting close approach. With the world’s attention fixing more and more on space rocks, this flyby highlights how big and potentially deadly objects can appear without