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Don't Worry, They Say, 100-Foot Asteroid Will Miss Us Today

A NASA artist's illustration depicts an asteroid belt around a star that the space agency says is "the same age and size as our Sun."
NASA/JPL-Caltech
A NASA artist's illustration depicts an asteroid belt around a star that the space agency says is "the same age and size as our Sun."

Don't say you weren't warned.

But also don't worry, the experts say.

As we wrote last month when an asteroid measuring about 900 feet long passed near enough to Earth to generate headlines about a "close encounter," more rocks are always headed our way.

And as the schedule of what's known to be closing in shows, asteroid 2014 DX110 is due today. The 100-foot wide chunk of space rock is supposed to pass by within about 217,000 miles of our planet.

How close is that? Well, the experts at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory point out that the "average distance between Earth and its moon is about 239,000 miles." (Don't worry, by the way, the asteroid is not on a collision path with the moon, either.)

As for the time when we should we all listen (and hopefully not hear) a big whoosh, JPL says DX110 is due to zip past around 4 p.m. ET.

Don't expect to see anything, though. Australian Eye News notes that "backyard observers are likely out of luck since the asteroid will be too dark to view directly."

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.