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Car-size asteroid gives Earth a super-close shave with flyby closer than some satellites

It gets so close that the line on NASA's trajectory map for the asteroid actually passes through Earth as it crosses the planet's orbit. Don't worry, this is a harmless space rock.

This means it's an asteroid with a weight-class that would have burned up in Earth's atmosphere, if its orbit happened to intersect ours more directly. Astronomers believe the asteroid's to Earth will occur at 2:28:42 p.m. EDT (18:28:42 GMT) on Thursday, at a distance of 11,600 miles (18,700 kilometers). GJ2's 2093 approach is estimated to fly as close as 127,970 miles (205,947 kilometers) to us — 10 times further than today's flyby, and just over half the distance between Earth and the moon.

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