Al-Marsad newspaper: NASA has indicated that a potentially dangerous asteroid the size of the blue whale, the largest animal on Earth, will pass away from Earth today.
The asteroid, named 2015 FF, is expected to come within 0.02864 astronomical units, or about 2.6 million miles, from Earth’s surface, at 08:09 UTC (09:09 GMT).
The 2015 FF has a diameter of between 42 and 92 feet (13 to 28 metres), which means it can be the average size of a blue whale (90 feet), or nearly three times the length of a London bus, and the 2015 FF moves at 9.1 km per second or more. 20,512 mph – nearly 30 times the speed of sound.
Despite being 10 times farther from the Moon, the asteroid has been classified as a Near-Earth Object (NEO) and is being tracked by the space agency, and 2015 FF represents a “potential hazard” because it is within 0.05 astronomical units (4.65 million miles) from Earth. Although it is much smaller than other hazardous objects (PHOs).
2015 FF – which can be tracked on NASA’s website – is 2.6 million miles away, but that’s relatively close in astronomical terms.
2015 FF was defined by NEO, although it is not expected to cause damage and a near-Earth object is an asteroid or comet whose orbit brings it to or across an area between about 91 million and 121 million miles (195 million km) from the sun, which means It can pass within about 30 million miles (50 million kilometers) of Earth’s orbit.
NASA noted: “Near-Earth objects are comets and asteroids pushed by the gravity of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.”
Composed mostly of water ice with embedded dust particles, they originally formed in the cold outer planetary system while most rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.