‘Planet killer’ asteroid to make close pass to Earth on Thursday afternoon

An asteroid described as the size of a mountain will come within 4.1 million miles of Earth just after 4 p.m. EDT Thursday.

Asteroid 2011 UL21 is one of the largest space rocks – 1.1- to 2.4 miles wide – to come that close to Earth in the past 125 years.

The asteroid is larger than 99% of known near-Earth asteroids, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), but poses no risk to Earth.

Thursday afternoon the asteroid will fly past Earth at about 58,000 mph. According to Live Science, the asteroid is considered a near-Earth asteroid, meaning its orbit occasionally puts it within 1.3 astronomical units (AU) of the sun — or roughly 1.3 times the average distance between Earth and the sun and orbits the Earth once every three years.

Asteroid 2011 UL21 will move past Earth at around 4.1 million miles, closer than it’s been to our planet for at least 110 years, according to simulations by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

You can watch the asteroid fly by on a livestream from the Virtual Telescope Project (VTP), which will share the view of the asteroid from the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Ceccano, Italy. The stream begins at 4 p.m. EDT on Thursday, with the close approach predicted to occur 15 minutes later.

2011 UL21 will not get this close to Earth again until 2089.

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