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The WC9 asteroid 2010 will pass even closer to Earth than the Moon Tuesday – closer than it has been for 300 years.
According to Dr. Erin Ryan, an asteroid expert at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the catchy 2010 WC9 is 200 to 400 feet in diameter. It is expected to travel 126,000 miles from Earth, about half the distance from the moon, to 29,000 miles per hour on Tuesday at 6:05 pm EST.
You may think that this meeting would be a show, but the 2010 CM9 is also relatively wise; he was too weak to be visible to the naked eye. The observatories of the Northolt subsidiary in London, England, began broadcasting their live approach around 7 pm on May 14.
Despite all its proximity and speed, NASA is certain that the asteroid presents no real danger. "We knew enough not to worry," said Dr. Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Objects Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, after the discovery of the object in 2010.
Chodas said that an asteroid the size of the 2010 CM9 was hitting the Earth about every 6,000 years, but luckily for us, it does not seem like we have to confirm it personally in the near future. In December 2017, Dr. Amy Mainzer – an asteroid expert at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – stated that there was "no identified object on a collision course with the Earth".
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