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The dreaded asteroid, christened by NASA's 2019 asteroid GC6, will pass over the Earth on Thursday, April 18 in the morning. NASA's asteroid trackers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) predict that the asteroid will be closest to Earth around 7:31 am UTC). When that happens, the asteroid will traverse our native world at a dizzying speed of over 12,570 km / h, or 5.62 km per second. But how much does NASA expect space rock to appear this week?
According to the US Space Agency, the asteroid is about to fire at a distance of 0.57 from the lunar distance (LD).
A lunar distance is the approximate distance from Earth to the Moon and is approximately 238,856 miles or 384,402 km.
This means that the GC6 asteroid will come almost halfway to the moon distance – 136,147.9 miles (219 108.8.8 km).
But there is no need to ring the alarm bells for now and the space rock will not fly between the Earth and its natural satellites.
READ MORE: How often do asteroids hit Earth?
NASA's orbital calculations show that there is no immediate threat of impact, nor in the foreseeable future.
Thursday's flyby is however closest to the asteroid's arrival on Earth between April 16, 1983 and September 12, 2106.
The GC6 asteroid is an excellent example of a so-called "near-Earth asteroid" (NEA) or "near-Earth object" (NEO).
NEOs are all asteroids and comets that sometimes cut the Earth's orbit as they pass through the inner rings of the solar system.
READ MORE: Watch the main asteroid DESTROY Earth in a violent accident simulation
Many of these far – space impactors originate in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and have been pushed into our corner of space by the powerful gravitational forces of the planets.
NASA stated: "When they gravitate around the Sun, objects close to the Earth can sometimes approach the Earth.
"Note that a" near "passage astronomically can be very far in human terms: millions or even tens of millions of kilometers."
The US Space Agency estimates that GC6 is approximately 13 to 29 m (42.6 to 29 ft) in diameter.
READ MORE: NASA plans to save the Earth by derailing a 2,600-foot asteroid
In the upper part of NASA's estimate, the size of the asteroid is comparable to that of two-and-a-half-storey London buses.
The Space Rock is also longer than 14 Queen Size Beds lined up in a row and seven Volkswagen Beetle cars.
Once the asteroid crosses the Earth on Thursday, the rock will return to Earth later this year, November 21.
The asteroid CG6 will again approach our planet in April and December 2026 and will continue to do so until 2106.
Are there asteroids heading straight for the Earth?
At the present time, there are no known asteroids or comets that threaten to touch the Earth in the near future.
Asteroids with a certain level of risk and a diameter greater than 140 m (460 feet) are referred to as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs).
These objects are closely monitored by NASA systems at JPL.
Astronomer Karren Masters, of Haverford College, said: "When an asteroid has an orbit that could impact the Earth, many more observations are made to try to better constrain the orbit , and these observations often prove that the In reality, the asteroid will not have any impact on the Earth. "
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