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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...

The space rock will fly harmlessly past our planet. Asteroid VH5 2019 will make its flyby at about 17.9 lunar distances on Dec. 8, according to the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The asteroid has dimensions of 57 meters (187 feet) by 130 meters (426.5 feet), NASA says. Citing the asteroid’s dimensions, the Inquisitr website describes the rock as “pyramid-shaped,” noting that it is almost as large as the famous Great Pyramid of Giza. The Apollo asteroid is one of five space rocks set to fly by Earth over the weekend, according to the Inquisitr,...

Details regarding the incoming space rock have been collected by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The agency noted that the asteroid, which has been identified as 2019 WW, is currently flying across space towards Earth at an average speed of almost 22,000 miles per hour. According to CNEOS, the asteroid has an estimated diameter of 236 feet, making it longer than the wingspan of a Boeing 747 plane. 2019 WW has been labeled as an Apollo asteroid due to its natural orbit. Like other Apollo asteroids, 2019 WW follows a wide orbit around the Sun and the Earth....

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...

The American space agency says that one object is a massive comet, but has so far been unable to identify the other NASA recently spotted two massive space objects hurtling towards Earth. While the American space agency has pinpointed one as a comet, the other has left it slightly more baffled. The comet is set to fly close to Earth this week, but the mystery object isn't expected to make an appearance until February. The object, dubbed "2016 WF9", was detected by NASA's asteroid- and comet-hunting NEOWISE project on 27 November 2016. It is roughly 0.3 to 0.6 miles (0.5...