Asteroid to Skim the Earth before Christmas
An asteroid measuring more than one mile in diameter will fly past the planet on a so-called Earth Close Approach, space agency NASA revealed, but thankfully the odds of it hitting Earth are minimal.
At its closest, the space rock will reach the planet within 0.01890 astronomical units (AU). One astronomical unit measures approximately 93 million miles (149.5 million km) and describes the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Asteroid SD220 will close this distance down to just 1.7 million miles (2.8 million km). This is the equivalent of 7.36 Lunar Distances (LD) or 7.36-times the distance between the Moon and Earth.
On the cosmic scale of distances, this is an incredibly close brush with the killer space rock.
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