Fear not — though these asteroids are passing relatively close to Earth, they're still a great distance away, experts say
Several massive asteroids are expected to whiz close to Earth in the coming weeks, including one nearly the size of the Empire State Building.
"Astronomically, these are coming close to the Earth. But in human terms, they are millions of miles away and can get no closer than millions of miles away," Paul Chodas, the director of the CNEOS at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, told ABC News.The center tracks near-Earth objects for the entire asteroid community so that when close approaches happen astronomers can know where and when and observe their movements.
"That asteroid has a diameter of 5.6 to 13 meters . That's a tiny asteroid coming to about the distance of the moon. It's still a long, long way, it can't hit the Earth, there's no chance of that," Chodas said. The center has discovered and tracked over 27,000 near-Earth objects. Asteroids range in size with most being small-, medium-size asteroids ranging from 300 meters to 600 meters in size and large ones 1 kilometer and up in size. He said many of the asteroids that pass Earth are tiny and burn up when they enter the planet's atmosphere.
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