An asteroid will pass close to Earth on November 2, one day before the US presidential elections. This was reported by the Center for the Study of Near-Earth Objects. The body will be at a minimum distance of 348,000 kilometers from the planet, reports CNN.
The celestial body, called 2018VP1, was identified in 2018 at the Palomar Observatory in California. It has a diameter of 0.002 kilometers. According to experts, the chances of it entering the atmosphere or colliding with the Earth are low: 0.41%, or one in 240.
Many collisions
According to a study published by the journal Science in 2019, in the last 290 million years, the Earth and the Moon have experienced more than twice as many collisions with asteroids than there were in the previous 700 million years.
They usually hit our planet every million or a few million years . Because of this, NASA’s list shows no major outstanding threats. The greatest known risk is a 4,200-foot-wide asteroid with a 99.988% chance that it will not reach Earth when it flies very close to it 861 years from now.