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The asteroid, christened by NASA Asteroid 2019 KA4, was first sighted in flight to Earth on May 29 this year. Astronomers now predict that the asteroid will pass in front of our original planet on the morning of Wednesday, June 4th. According to NASA's asteroid trackers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), space rock will fly around 7:33 pm, English time or 1:23 pm Eastern time. And when that happens, NASA revealed that the asteroid was firing at a speed of less than 7.16 kilometers per second.
The asteroid KA4 is what is called an Earth-like asteroid (NEA), which is a type of near-Earth object (NEO) associated with near-Earth comets ( NEC).
The Australian University Swinburne explained: "Asteroids whose orbits bring them relatively close to the Earth – perihelion distances of less than 1.3 ua – are known, unsurprisingly, as near-Earth asteroids.
"Alternately referred to as" Near Earth Objects "because some of them are thought to be the core of extinct comets rather than asteroids, the majority of NEAs originate from the main asteroid belt and are disrupted towards inside by collisions between asteroids or the gravitational influence of Jupiter. "
NEAs are generally divided into Aten, Apollo and Amor spacecraft, depending on their respective orbits.
READ MORE: How often do asteroids hit Earth?
The asteroid KA4 represents the last type of asteroids as it follows a similar path to the asteroid 1221 Amor.
NASA estimates that the size of space rocks is between 16 and 36 meters in diameter.
An object in this range may not seem so terrifying, but similarly sized asteroids have been known to cause chaos and destruction in the past.
In 2013, for example, a 20-meter-wide space rock exploded over the Chelyabinsk Oblast (Russia), blowing through the windows and injuring more than a thousand people with glass.
READ MORE: Watch a major asteroid DESTROY Earth in crash simulation
When the asteroid hit the planet without being detected, NASA described the incident as a cosmic "awakening" to the dangers hovering in space.
So, is there a chance that the asteroid hits the planet tomorrow morning?
Fortunately, the asteroid KA4 should miss the Earth from a different point of view.
According to NASA, the asteroid will fly at a distance of about 0.02153 astronomical units.
READ MORE: Unreliable comets from another system may contain "foreign material".
An astronomical unit is about 149 million km, which is the distance between the sun and the moon.
This means that the asteroid KA4 will reduce it tomorrow to only 3 million km.
In other words, the rock will pass the Earth 8,32 times farther than the Moon.
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."
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