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The asteroid, christened by NASA's Asteroid 2019 DD, is moving towards an approach called "Earth Close Approach". The news comes just two days after NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) observed the asteroid flying in space for the first time. NASA's JPL estimates that the DD asteroid is positioned to fly over the Earth at breakneck speed on Friday, March 1st. When the asteroid passes near it, it will reach its closest possible distance from the Earth around 13:06 GMT (UTC).
The JPL also believes that the asteroid DD will perform its incredible approach at speeds above 23,190 km / h or 10.37 km per second.
Fortunately, NASA does not expect space rock to come directly to Earth tomorrow.
Instead, the asteroid will make a typical close-up approach to so-called "near-Earth objects" (NEOs).
When asteroids and comets gravitate around the Sun, they often intersect with the Earth's trajectory in the system.
READ MORE: How often do asteroids hit Earth?
From time to time, these objects approach very close to the Earth, enough to justify the interest of the trackers of asteroids of the world.
NASA explained: "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 NASA JPL estimates that the asteroid DD will approach the Earth at a distance of 0.01909 astronomical unit (at).
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A single astronomical unit measures about 149 million km (93 million miles) and is the average distance from the Sun to the Earth.
Tomorrow, the DD asteroid should reduce this distance to only 2.85 million kilometers.
In other words, it is the equivalent of 7.43 lunar distances (LD) or 7.43 times the space between the Earth and the Moon.
Asteroid DD is an Apollo-type space rock, which means that it has an orbit that crosses the Earth's trajectory in the same way as that of the 1862 Apollo asteroid.
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NASA's JPL estimates that the DD measurements are within a range of 32.8 to 75.5 feet (10 to 23 m) in diameter.
At the upper end of the scale, the asteroid is 11 times longer than a Queen Size bed.
Toward the lower limit of the estimate, the asteroid has about the length of a London double-decker bus.
After tomorrow's flyby, NASA predicts that the DD asteroid will approach Earth four more times between October 14, 2019 and August 18, 2010.
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