A large asteroid will zip past Earth this weekend, but don’t worry: It poses no danger.<\/p>\n
The space rock \u2014 1997 NC1 \u2014 makes its closest approach Saturday evening (approx 11.15pm NZT), coming within 2.6 million kilometres according to the European Space Agency.<\/p>\n
Discovered nearly three decades ago by an asteroid-tracking system in Hawaii, the asteroid is between 0.75km to 1.65km wide \u2014 roughly the size of two to four Empire State Buildings.<\/p>\n
Skygazers with binoculars and small telescopes may be able to spot the asteroid as a small point of light passing harmlessly through the sky. It won’t greet Earth from such a distance again until 2133, according to NASA.<\/p>\n
The last time an asteroid similar in size passed safely by Earth from an even closer distance was in 2022, when a space rock called 1994 PC1 made its approach.<\/p>\n
NASA, ESA and other space agencies track the paths of asteroids and other space junk so they can keep Earth safe from any possible collisions. Last year, astronomers tracked a smaller asteroid resembling a spinning hockey puck and said there’s no chance of it hitting Earth or the moon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A large asteroid will zip past Earth this weekend, but don’t worry: It poses no danger. The space…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-497348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}