150-Foot Asteroid: Alarmingly Close to Earth Only Hours After Spotted
(The AEGIS Alliance) – An asteroid somewhere in the estimation of 150 feet in diameter came alarmingly close and passed Earth this past Sunday morning only hours after being first observed by astronomers.
This asteroid is named Asteroid 2018 GE3, and it was the closest to Earth at about 2.41 a.m. Eastern Time on April the 15th of 2018. It had been spotted around just 119,500 miles away, reported EarthSky.org. This was closer than the moon in distance, which is orbiting Earth at an averaging distance of 238,900 miles away. GE3 also made a pass near the moon later in the morning as it made a journey around our solar system’s star, the sun.
Asteroid 2018 GE3 could have been over six times larger in size than the Chelyabinsk meteorite, which made a big explosion over central Russia during 2013. When this meteorite struck the atmosphere it was seen causing a bright flash. Thousands of fragments fell to Earth around the region of Chelyabinsk, which broke windows and injured an estimated 1,500 people. If GE3 would’ve reached Earth’s atmosphere it’s possible it would have caused similar, or even more severe damages.
This asteroid had been first observed by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey project, which is located and based at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Lab within Tucson, Arizona.
Kyle James Lee – The AEGIS Alliance – This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
