An asteroid almost as tall as the Blackpool Tower located in England is coming towards the orbit of the Earth at a high speed. The space rock, which is currently being watched by NASA is on the track of entering the orbit of the Earth on Tuesday, November 10, 2020, as per reports.
It is expected to go past the Earth at a speed of 25,050 miles per hour, which is similar to that of 11.20 kilometer per second. The US space research organization NASA estimated thre rock, which is dubbed 2020 UL3, will fly past at 12.48 Eastern Standard Time, which is 6.48 according to the British Standard Time.
Asteroid Approaching Earth's Orbit
The space research organization predicted that the asteroid is anywhere between 53m and 130m, which is equivalent to 173 and 426 feet. The Blackpool Tower that was built on May 14, 1894, is around 154m. Without the spire, the tower is just more than 135m, which makes the asteroid almost the size of the tourist attraction. UL3 was identified as an Apollo asteroid, which is a space rock that crosses the Earth's orbit as it goes through space.
It is also classed as a Near-Earth Object, which as per the space research organization is a term that is used for describing comets and asteroids that have got nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into the orbits that allow them to enter the neighborhood of the Earth. To get classed as a NEO object also has to come within the 1.3 astronomical units. This may seem close but the asteroid UL3 is estimated to have passed through space at a distance of 0.039 astronomical units from the Earth.
Putting this into perspective, this is similar to 3,625,276 Earth land miles. It is not likely that the UL3 is going to cause any issues for the Earth and life on the planet but in rare cases, they can cause trouble for the weather systems. Earth has not witnessed an asteroid of apocalyptic scale after the space rock that wiped the dinosaurs around 66 million years ago.
