Tech

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Massive asteroid to race past Earth

A giant asteroid, 100 feet wide, is set to fly past Earth early Wednesday evening, soaring fewer than 218,000 miles from our planet, which is slightly closer than the orbit of the moon itself.

Called asteroid 2014 DX110, the extraterrestrial visitor will stay a safe distance away from our planet, experts said.

But as it barrels by at 33,000 miles per hour, the comet will present quite a spectacle. You’ll be able to watch the flyby in a live webcast directly through the website of the Slooh space telescope, as well as the VirtualTelescope.com site.



“We continue to discover these potentially hazardous asteroids – sometimes only days before they make their close approaches to Earth,” Slooh’s technical and research director, Paul Cox said in a statement a few weeks ago, before a very similar asteroid was discovered zipping past our planet.

Slooh’s asteroid research campaign is gathering momentum with Slooh members using the Slooh robotic telescopes to monitor this huge population of potentially hazardous space rocks.