ASTEROID THE SIZE OF A BUS GRAZES PAST EARTH

An asteroid the size of a bus came to within 186,000 miles of Earth – a close shave in cosmic terms – on Saturday morning. The recently-detected asteroid HL129 was closer to Earth than the Moon – which is on average 238,855 miles away from our planet – on its closest approach at 4.13am.

The asteroid is about 7.6 metres wide, according to NASA’s Asteroid Watch project based at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California

An asteroid of that size would cause significant damage if it impacted a major city, potentially hitting with the impact of a nuclear bomb roughly half the size of the one that hit Hiroshima in 1945.

According to Space.com.

The asteroid was discovered on Wednesday, April 28, by astronomers with the Mount Lemmon Survey team, according to an alert by the Minor Planet Center, an arm of the International Astronomical Union that chronicles asteroid discoveries, reports.

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