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Two medium-sized asteroids will fly safely past Earth overnight Friday to Saturday U.S. Eastern Time, the U.S. space agency NASA announced Thursday. Tracking the objects, NASA said orbit calculations had ruled out any chance that the objects could pose a threat to the planet. Near-Earth asteroid called 2010 C01, estimated to be 120 meters to 260 meters in size, will safely pass Earth at 11:42 p.m. on Friday, and the second object called 2000 QWZ, estimated to be 290 meters to 650 meters in size, will pass later at 7:54 a.m. on Saturday, according to NASA. "Both of these asteroids are passing at about 14 lunar distances from the Earth, or about 3.5 million miles away, but small asteroids pass by Earth this close all the time," said Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer and program executive for the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA. Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets that orbit the sun, but their orbits bring them into Earth's neighborhood, or within 48 million kilometers of Earth's orbit. Scientists identify the orbit of an asteroid by comparing measurements of its position as it moves across the sky to the predictions of a computer model of its orbit around the sun. At the start of this year, the number of discovered near-Earth objects totaled over 19,000, and it has since surpassed 20,000. An average of 30 new discoveries are added each week, according to NASA. |
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