NASA: 'Potentially Hazardous Asteroid' Will Cruise Past Earth On Super Bowl Sunday
Image Credit: bgr.com
Original Article | Author: Josh Hafner
An asteroid spanning one-third of a mile will hurtle past earth at some 76,000 mph on Super Bowl Sunday.
And while NASA calls the rocky mass known as 2002 AJ129 a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid," fear not: It's not slated to crash into Earth.
"We have been tracking this asteroid for over 14 years and know its orbit very accurately," Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement.
"Our calculations indicate that asteroid 2002 AJ129 has no chance — zero — of colliding with Earth on Feb. 4 or any time over the next 100 years."
So what makes the asteroid "potentially hazardous"? NASA uses a preset criteria to define such bodies. Any that come within 4,650,000 miles of Earth and measure more than 500 feet in diameter become categorized as "Potentially Hazardous Asteroids."
In fact, after providing the stats above, NASA revealed that next month's asteroid won't come closer than 2.6 million miles from our planet. That's roughly 10 times the distance between Earth and moon.
(An asteroid came just around 26,000 miles from hitting Earth last fall, for comparison.)
The Feb. 4 asteroid will come closest to the Earth at about 4:30 p.m. Eastern time — too soon for it to see the Patriots' Tom Brady crush the Eagles' souls.
