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A large asteroid will pass by our planet next week.
The asteroid will make its closest approach to our planet on January 18. The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) is managed by NASA at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The table shows that the asteroid will zoom by our planet at the equivalent of five lunar distances at its closest approach. This will be a safe flyby, and the closest one to Earth will be in 200 years.
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When our neighborhood was filled with objects like it, asteroids were leftovers from the early solar system. Near-Earth objects are a subset of the thousands of asteroids that exist. The 7482 flyby is a typical Earth flyby reported by media every year.
Any asteroids or comets that come within 1.3 astronomical units of each other are considered to be NEOs, according to NASA. The agency was mandated by Congress to find and report at least 90 percent of all the larger NEOs by the end of 2020.
NASA has a network of partner telescopes on the ground and in space that are used to find and monitor potentially hazardous asteroids.
NASA launched a mission called Double Asteroid Redirection Test that will attempt to alter the path of an asteroid's moonlet in the fall of 2022. The OSIRIS-REx mission is en route from asteroid Bennu with an asteroid sample, which may help with future asteroid composition studies and aid defense measures.
NASA wants to put a dedicated mission into space by the year 2026, to find new asteroids. In the decade after launch, the agency says that the NEO Surveyor should be able to find 90 percent of the larger NEOs.
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