This flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close.
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This asteroid, like the one that will fly by on February 15, is considered a near-Earth object.
"No Earth impact is possible, " according to Don Yeomans, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
To date, balloon-borne activities have centered around heliophysics and astrophysics that have not required precision-pointing, says Near-Earth Object (NEO) program officer Rob Landis at NASA headquarters.
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"The meteor was probably about the size of an SUV, " said Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif.
"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years, " said Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office, in a statement.
This question is being taken increasingly seriously by scientists as more is learnt about the impact a near earth object (NEO) would have on the future of civilization.
It's hard to predict exactly how bright Pan-STARRS will be, but you should be able to see it without binoculars or telescopes, said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program.
The Near Earth Object (NEO) database is working to do that, but it is very difficult to locate all of the objects either closer to the sun or behind it.
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"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average, " Paul Chodas of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said last week.
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"We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average, " said Paul Chodas, of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
The US space agency's (Nasa) Near Earth Object programme reports on its website that it has recorded 1068 known "Potentially Hazardous Asteroids", however there are thousands more estimated to be present in space.
When he detected the object, Bill Yeung contacted the Minor Planet Center in Massachusetts, the clearing house for such discoveries, which gave it the designation J002E3 and posted it on their Near-Earth Object Confirmation webpage.
An object entered Earth's atmosphere in 1908 before breaking up over Siberia.
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"This is going to be the largest sample of an extraterrestrial object returned to Earth since end of the Apollo missions over 40 years ago, " said Edward Beshore, deputy principal investigator for the mission, who is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
Its smaller diameter is also good news, since there is still one chance in 1800 that the object could slam into earth in 2182.
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It has long been thought that the lunar body resulted from an impact between the early Earth and another planet-sized object 4.5 billion years ago.
Ultimately, the logical conclusion of wireless graffiti systems would be the ability to attach information to any object or place on earth with an accuracy of a metre or less.
The meteor that crashed to earth in Russia was about 55 feet in diameter, weighed around 10, 000 tons and was made from a stony material, scientists said, making it the largest such object to hit the Earth in more than a century.
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Dr Chatterjee therefore suggests that an object 40km in diameter hit the Earth off the coast of India and forced vast quantities of lava out of the Deccan Traps.
The first is of all the objects in the solar system, Mars is the most likely object for life, other than the Earth.
Calculating the density of an object 340m kilometres (210m miles) from earth is no easy task.
The report also examines the possibility that it could have been space junk burning up on re-entry -- citing the Satview website, which notes that an object from orbit was due to burn through Earth's atmosphere at around that time.
It is only every 2, 000 years or so that an object the size of a football field descends to earth and causes significant damage, according to NASA. Giant asteroids that crash to earth such as the one that most likely extinguished the dinosaurs tend to occur on the scale of millions of years.
Yet many areologists, as students of Mars are sometimes known, could not let go of the idea that the object of their affections was once an active world like the earth.
Soon, however, the object's motion suggested it was in an orbit around the Earth.
The mission would further clarify the threat that this particular object poses, and better predict the orbits of other near-Earth asteroids, Beshore said.
Using gravitational microlensing, scientists are able to determine when the gravity of a large object alters the light coming from a star on its way to Earth.
If an object floating through space passes near the line of sight between the earth and a distant star, its gravity should, according to the theory of relativity, bend and focus the light from that star.
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