NASA’s new space-monitoring system has detected a large asteroid hurtling towards Earth, which is scheduled to pass us safely in the next few hours.
The asteroid, which was first spotted last week, is estimated to clear us with a comfortable distance of around 498,000 km (310,000 miles) — around 1.3 times further away than our Moon. But thanks to NASA’s new software, we had days rather than hours to assess and prepare for the risk.
The rock, officially named 2016 UR36, was first detected on October 25 by a telescope in Hawaii.
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