NASA said that a “potentially dangerous” asteroid the size of a blue whale, the largest animal on Earth, will pass away from Earth today.
The asteroid, named 2015 FF, is expected to come within 0.02864 astronomical units, or about 2.6 million miles, from Earth’s surface, at 08:09 UTC (09:09 GMT).
The 2015 FF has a diameter of between 42 and 92 feet (13 to 28 metres) – which means it could be the average size of a blue whale (90 feet), or nearly three times the length of a London bus.
The 2015 FF is moving at 9.1 km per second or 20,512 mph – nearly 30 times the speed of sound.
Despite being ten times farther from the Moon, the asteroid has been classified as a Near-Earth Object (NEO) and is being tracked by the space agency.
2015 FF represents a “potential hazard” because it is located within 0.05 astronomical units (4.65 million miles) of Earth, although it is much smaller than other hazardous objects (PHOs).
Although 2015 FF – which can be tracked on NASA’s website – is 2.6 million miles away, this is relatively close in astronomical terms.
For this reason, 2015 FF has been identified by NEO, although it is not expected to cause harm. A near-Earth object is an asteroid or comet that its orbit brings to or through an area between about 91 million and 121 million miles (195 million km) from the Sun, which means that it can pass within about 30 million miles (50 million km) of Earth’s orbit. .
“Near-Earth objects are comets and asteroids pushed by the gravity of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter Earth’s neighborhood,” NASA said.
Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, they originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Scientific interest in comets and asteroids is largely due to their status as the relatively unchanging remnants of the solar system’s formation process about 4.6 billion years ago.