An asteroid will pass Earth on Friday at 2.30 pm PST (4 am Indian Standard Time on Saturday), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, said. The asteroid, named 2018 CB, is between 50 and 130 feet in size and was discovered by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey on February 4.
2018 CB will pass within 39,000 miles (63,000 km) of earth, which is less than one-fifth the distance between the earth and the moon.
“Although 2018 CB is quite small, it might well be larger than the asteroid that entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, almost exactly five years ago, in 2013,” Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA said. “Asteroids of this size do not often approach this close to our planet.”
On January 6, an asteroid passed within 1,14,000 miles (1,83,000 km) of the earth.
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