NASA revealed that this newly discovered asteroid, about the size of a truck, would zoom 2,200 miles above the southern tip of South America Thursday evening.
A giant asteroid the size of a football field is scheduled to pass through Earth’s atmosphere over the weekend. Scientists say that the 330-foot-wide fiery rock will miss striking the Earth’s surface by nearly 600,000 miles - about three times the distance between our planet and the moon.
After witnessing some of the damage that a dinner table-sized meteor did last week after crashing into central Russia, imagine the magnitude of destruction that would have occurred if that flaming rock was the length of 18 football fields. Now stop imagining, because scientists say it happened.
Seventeen-thousand miles might not sound particularly close at first listen, but when it comes to a gigantic rock the size of half a football field, it's a bit scarier.