The James Webb Space Telescope suffered “significant” and “uncorrectable” damage due to the impact of a “micrometeroid” at its location a million miles away from Earth, NASA revealed this month.
A particularly big asteroid will pass by Earth particularly close on Monday night, and the encounter will be streamed live online. Don’t worry: The flyby will be completely safe and doesn’t pose any risk to anything or anyone on Earth or any of our satellites. But asteroid 2021 EQ3 will come closer to Earth than our lone natural satellite.
The largest asteroid to pass by Earth this year will approach within about 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) of our planet on March 21, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said Thursday.
The water ice and other lunar resources that will help the United States establish a long-term human presence on the moon are there for the taking, the White House believes.
An asteroid measuring between 30 feet and 100 feet is set to pass Earth on October 12 at a distance of 27,000 miles—about an eighth of the distance to the Moon. This makes it one of the largest close approach asteroids to brush past Earth this year, and presents NASA with a valuable opportunity: To test out its planetary defense systems.
A large rock will fly past Earth on Sept. 1, 2017, at a distance of 4.4 million miles (7 million kilometers). Asteroid 3122 Florence, named after modern nursing founder Florence Nightingale, is the largest object to make a close-encounter since NASA began tracking near-Earth objects (NEO) in the 1990s.