Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the 271-meter-wide asteroid 2008 OS7 will approach the Earth at its closest distance in the last 100 years on Friday evening, February 2. The Virtual Telescope project will go live on February 2 at 20:00 Moscow time, during which it will be possible to observe the approach of asteroid 2008 OS7.

This celestial body must fly past our planet from a distance of 2 million 850 thousand kilometers.

Asteroid 2008 OS7 will not hit Earth, but if it did, it could easily destroy a huge metropolis the size of New York.

2008 OS7 has a very long orbit around the Sun. Therefore, each time a rocky object approaches the Earth, its distance from the planet changes. For example, when the asteroid was discovered in 2008, it was 30 times farther away than it would have been on February 2. More precisely, there was a distance of 90 million kilometers between the Earth and the asteroid.

Calculations based on the movement of an asteroid in the solar system showed that it has not come this close to our planet in the last 124 years. The next time such a rapprochement will occur is in 2198.