Asteroid to have close encounter with Earth

A NEWLY discovered asteroid the size of a large house will narrowly miss Earth when it passes by on Monday.

While it will pose no threat to Earth, it will be an unusually close encounter when it passes just over 12,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, NASA officials say.

The asteroid will make its closest approach at 1.26pm and would be visible through basic telescopes.

The lunchtime date with the asteroid — named 2011 MD by scientists — will see it sailing high off the coast of Antarctica, almost 3,218km south-southwest of South Africa.

Asteroid 2011 MD was discovered only last Wednesday by LINEAR, a pair of robotic telescopes in New Mexico that scan the skies for near-Earth asteroids.

An alert was then put out by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Centre in Massachusetts.

The find was confirmed by Peter Birtwhistle, who has discovered dozens of asteroids from his own 16” telescope, with a photo taken from his private observatory in Great Shefford in Berkshire in Britain.

The best estimates suggest that this asteroid is between 29 to 98 feet wide.

It will be a relatively small miss on Monday — as the asteroid is coming 23 times closer than the moon.

The space rock will reach within 11,000 miles of the planet’s surface and give off a light bright enough to be seen through a small telescope, experts said.

“We are certain that it will miss us, but if it did enter the atmosphere, an asteroid of this size would mostly burn up in a brilliant fireball, possibly scattering a few meteorites,” the Daily Telegraph quoted British asteroid expert Dr Emily Baldwin as saying.

Discoveries of small near-Earth asteroids have soared since the year 2000, with the growth of automated sky surveys following in the footsteps of LINEAR, which found its first asteroid in 1996.

The next big asteroid event will be on November 8, when a 400-metre wide asteroid weighing 50 million tons, called 2005 YU55, is expected to fly inside the orbit of the moon.

Passing by at a distance of just 201,000 miles, the asteroid is the largest object to approach the earth so close that we have known about in advance.