Football stadium-size asteroid passing by earth early Wednesday

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An asteroid the “size of a football stadium” is moving at a fast pace toward Earth and will be visible via livestream early Wednesday morning.

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The asteroid will also be visible through an 20-centimetre telescope, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

It will be closest to the earth when it is 2.2M km away, reports Fast Company.

The massive space rock, known as 2020 XR, is moving at about 44,257 kph. It will pass by the earth at 12:27 a.m. ET on Wednesday, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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The asteroid is about 365.76 metres in diameter — large enough to wipe out a small city and has been designated a “near Earth object” or NEO, due to its size and the proximity of its orbit to the sun. According to Science Reference, 2020 XR is categorized as an Apollo-Class Asteroid, an object “whose orbit crosses the orbit of Earth.”

NASA defines any object that is larger than 150 metres and within 7,402,982 km of Earth as a “potentially hazardous object.”

However, scientists say there’s no need to worry about the asteroid, reports Vice.

“When astronomers first discovered 2020 XR, they thought it had a small chance of impacting Earth in 2028,” Juan Luis Cano, coordinator of the ESA’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Center, said in a statement. “But by going back and finding the asteroid in older data, they were able to refine its trajectory and rule out any hazard.”

Asteroid 2020 XR is expected to bypass Earth again in about four years, but it won’t pass this closely again until at least 2196, when it will be an estimated 18.2 million kilometres away.

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