Asteroid Apophis Is Swinging by This Weekend to Taunt Us
Image: Gianluca Masi/The Virtual Telescope Project
An asteroid with a small chance of hitting Earth in 2068 will swing past our planet in the coming days, providing a rare opportunity for astronomers to observe this potentially hazardous object.
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For its current sojourn around the Sun, asteroid 99942 Apophis will make its closest approach to Earth on March 6, 2021, during which time it will come to within 10.5 million miles (16.9 million kilometers) of our planet, according to a bulletin put out by astronomers with Goldstone Solar System Radar.
That’s a reasonably big distance about 44 times the distance to the Moon so there’s no need to worry.
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