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The Apollo-class asteroid, called 3361 Orpheus, is 984 feet wide and is travelling at around 18,000 miles per hour. NASA will be keeping a close eye on the huge space rock, which has made it onto the space agency's 'Close Approach' list. But there's no need to panic just yet – the asteroid will pass through a distance of 3.5 million miles from our home planet. Anything that passes within 120 million miles is considered a Near Earth Object (NEO), a term used to describe "comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into...

A 'death comet' will pass earth November 11 about 24million miles away It last showed itself on Halloween 2015 about 302,000 miles away from earth The comet has a human skull face and has been dubbed the Halloween asteroid The comet's next closest visit will occur on November 1, 2088 A 'death comet' will be zipping passed earth just after Halloween this year. The asteroid with a skull-like face will make its second trip near earth in three years after flying a worrisome 302,000 miles from our planet on October 31, 2015. This year, the comet will be a much...

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft began its final approach toward the big near-Earth asteroid Bennu on Friday (Aug. 17), NASA officials said. The milestone also marks the official start of OSIRIS-REx's "asteroid operations" mission phase, they added. OSIRIS-REx is still about 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Bennu and won't arrive in orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) space rock until Dec. 3. The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission — whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — launched on Sept. 8, 2016, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. If all goes according to...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2004 October 1 Earth Nears Asteroid Toutatis Illustration Credit: E. De Jong and S. Suzuki, JPL, NASA Explanation: On Wednesday, September 29, the Earth came within one million miles of the asteroid Toutatis -- the closest predicted aproach of our fair planet to a sizable asteroid or comet in this century. Coming within one million miles or about 4 times the Earth-Moon distance, Earth would appear to be...