Twenty-seven thousand miles up may seem like a lot, but it’s only an eighth of the distance from the Earth to the moon. Scientists say the friendly neighbor will be flying by just far enough to miss geostationary satellites.
— Susanne Auer (@AuerSusan) August 10, 2017
"It’s damn close," Rolf Densing, head of Germany’s European Space Operations Center, told AFP. "The farthest satellites are 36,000 kilometers out, so this is indeed a close miss."
First spotted by the Pan-STARRS observatory in Hawaii, officials were expecting the house-sized asteroid to reemerge this year after it disappeared in 2012 – they just didn’t know how far from Earth it would be. However, with the help of Chile’s Very Large Telescope, they’ve managed to track down and calculate the rock’s really not-great-enough-for-comfort distance.
"We know for sure that there is no possibility for this object to hit the Earth," Detlef Koschny, member of ESA’s Near Earth Objects team, reassuring told AFP. "There is no danger whatsoever."
"[It’s] an excellent opportunity to test the international ability to detect and track near-Earth objects and assess our ability to respond together to a real asteroid threat," ESA announced in a statement.
Measuring between 49 to 98 meters long, the travelling rock is similar in size to the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013. Though NASA estimated the 2013 asteroid weighted roughly 7,000 tons, researchers said it detonated with a force of 20 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
