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The asteroid, christened by NASA's 1999 VF22 asteroid, will be filmed tomorrow tomorrow on a so-called "near approach to Earth". NASA's asteroid trackers have restricted passage to the afternoon of Wednesday, February 20th. Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) expect the asteroid VF22 to approach Earth around 17:57 GMT (UTC). When that happens, the space rock will travel through space and reach unimaginable speeds of approximately 59,234 mph.
That equals 26.48 km per second, which is 78.2 times the speed of sound.
NASA's JPL also estimates that the VF22 measures a diameter between 200 and 450 m (656.2 feet).
An asteroid of this size would be located above the Empire State Building in New York, the Eiffel Tower in France and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Curiously, asteroids of this size hit the planet on average between 1,000 and 500,000 years ago.
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NASA's Asteroid Stalker: A Really Colossal Asteroid Will Pass At Full Speed From The Planet (Image: GETTY)
According to the European Space Agency (ESA), these asteroids are among the biggest threats lurking in the depths of space.
There are no known objects that cause concern, but many remain to be discovered
ESA said: "The main challenge comes from the population of average height objects, ranging from tens to hundreds of meters in diameter.
"There are a lot of these asteroids, and most of them have not been spotted yet. Any impact of any of these could actually damage a city or populated area.
"But if they are discovered early enough, their point of impact could be estimated with a good degree of accuracy and steps could be taken to protect people.
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"Today, no known object deserves to be worried, but many have not been discovered. We must therefore continue to search. "
Fortunately, nothing indicates that the asteroid VF22 will turn away from its orbit tomorrow to hit the Earth at full strength.
Even at its closest point, space rock will miss the Earth by more than 7.35 million km.
This will occur because VF22 is a so-called "Near Earth Objects" (NEO) – an asteroid or comet, which cuts the Earth's orbit.
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NASA's Asteroid Stalker: The Space Rock is Followed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Image: NASA)
NASA asteroid tracker: the asteroid will pass unimpeded on the Earth without hitting (Image: GETTY)
The NEOs often approach our planet, which may seem like a life, but on the cosmic scale, the distances are close.
NASA explained: "Near-Earth objects are asteroids or comets of sizes ranging from a few meters to several tens of kilometers that revolve around the Sun and whose orbits are close to those of the Earth.
"Of more than 600,000 known asteroids in our solar system, more than 16,000 are NEOs.
"An example of NEO is 25143 Itokawa, an object about 300 m in diameter visited by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa in 2005."
Tomorrow afternoon, the asteroid VF22 will approach our corner of space at a distance of about 0.04917 astronomical unit (au).
An astronomical unit measures about 149 million km, which corresponds to the distance of the garage between the Earth and the Moon.
The asteroid VF22 will reduce it during its flyby to only 4.57 million miles (7.35 million miles).
After flying over the space rock, NASA's JPL predicts that the VF22 will return to Earth on November 16, 2020.
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