NASA has revealed that an asteroid dubbed 2018 CB will flyby Earth closely on Friday, February 9.
The asteroid has a size around 15 to 30 meters it will be passing by Earth safely at around 5:30 pm EST (4 am IST on Saturday), at a distance of around 64,000 kilometers (39767.8 miles), which is less than one-fifth of the distance between the Earth and the Moon, IANS reported.
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"Although 2018 CB is quite small, it might well be larger than the asteroid that entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, almost exactly five years ago, in 2013," said Paul Chodas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"Asteroids of this size do not often approach this close to our planet -- maybe only once or twice a year," Chodas added.
This space rock was discovered by astronomers at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) in Arizona on February 4, 2018.
Another asteroid was spotted by the CSS on the same day which jazzed by Earth on Tuesday, February 6.
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Dubbed as asteroid 2018 CC, it is also speculated to be around 15 and 30 meters in size.
It passed by Earth closely at 3:10 pm EST at a distance of 184,000 kilometers (approx. 114332.3 miles), a NASA statement revealed.
Apart from these two asteroids, another spooky asteroid named 2015 TB145, which is known as the Halloween asteroid because of its appearance, is going to fly by our planet this year.
This asteroid is 640 meters wide and has a skull-like appearance. It had last passed by Earth on October 31, 2015, and it was at a distance of 480,000 kilometers from Earth.
This giant skull-like asteroid has a rotation period of 2.94 hours and it reflects five to six percent of the sunlight that hits it, astronomers found.
"This means that it is very dark, only slightly more reflective than charcoal," Pablo Santos-Sanz, an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia in Spain, was quoted as saying by space.com.
