Huge Asteroid 1998 QE2 Sails By Earth on Friday
By Megan Gannon | SPACE.com – 54 mins agoRELATED CONTENT
- While waiting for its close approach …
A massive asteroid nearly 2 miles wide will zip by Earth on Friday (May 31), in a cosmic event that has grabbed the attention of stargazers, scientists and even White House officials. The asteroid poses no threat of hitting Earth during the flyby, NASA officials assure.
The huge asteroid 1998 QE2 is the size of nine cruise ships, about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) across, NASA scientists say. While the asteroid makes its closest approach to Earth on Friday, traveling within 3.6 million miles (5.8 million km), you don't have to wait that long to see it. NASA chief Charles Bolden will host live telescope views of the asteroid today (May 30) at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1739 GMT) during a one-hour broadcast from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
You can watch the asteroid webcast live on SPACE.com courtesy of NASA. Later tonight, NASA will host a webchat about the asteroid with the agency's meteor expert William Cooke at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. That discussion begins at 8 p.m. EDT (0000 GMT) and can be accessed here: http://www.nasa.gov/chat
Then on Friday (May 31), just hours before the asteroid flyby, the White House will host its own asteroid-themed "We the Geeks" Google+ Hangout starting at 2 p.m. EDT.
The live video conference will bring together experts including Bill Nye the Science Guy, former astronaut Ed Lu, NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, and Peter Diamandis, co-founder of asteroid mining company Planetary Resources. To watch these experts talk about the identification, resource potential and threat of asteroids, you can visit the White House's Google+ page: https://plus.google.com/+whitehouse/
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