this doesn t happen every day. in just over an hour s time an asteroid the size of a bus is due to skim past the tip of south america, just 2,200 miles from the earth s surface. nasa says it will be one of the closest asteroid approaches ever recorded. experts say that while this space rock is too small to do any damage, it illustrates how little we know about the near earth environment. i m joined now by andy rivkin, planetary astronomer atjohns hopkins university from laurel, maryland in the us. it s great to get you on the programme. just to make sure we re all safe here. how unusual is this close encounter? yeah, this object is passing something like 1% as close as the moon. the moon is 100 times further
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The mission, focused on the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid system, proved that an asteroid’s orbit can be altered by kinetic impactor technology. Rocks from space have walloped Earth for eons, and it’s only a matter of time until our planet lands yet again in the crosshairs of a very large asteroid. But unlike other forms of…