An asteroid the size of six football fields will accelerate Earth on Saturday night

An asteroid the size of six football fields will accelerate Earth on Saturday night

Asteroid 2002 NN4 will pass through Earth on Saturday at 11:20 p.m. ET, NASA says, According to the estimated diameter up to 1870 feet to the Center for the Study of Facilities Around the Country, will definitely seem great.

But it will be about 3.2 million kilometers away from our planet, 13 times farther from the moon, NASA says, so there’s really no reason to worry.

And such phenomena are quite normal. Last August, an asteroid estimated to be about the same size as the 2002 NN4 that passed by Earth, and experts at the time called it moderate in size.

And this asteroid is less than a kilometer long. The largest known asteroid orbiting the sun is 21 miles long, said Lindley Johnson of NASA’s Office of Coordinating Planetary Defense last year.

However, the probability that the asteroid will actually hit the Earth is quite small – it occurs once in two or three centuries, Johnson said at the time.

In 2013, a meteor with a diameter of only 55 meters broke through the Earth’s atmosphere over Russia. The meteor did not actually affect the planet, but the explosion still injured more than 1.00 people.

Since it is a million miles away, this should not be the case with the 2002 NN4. So you can spend Saturday night relaxing, knowing that the asteroid isn’t actually coming to us to explode. Today, at least.

The next time NN4 will be anywhere near us will be in June 2029.

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