Meteors fly close to the earth

A meteorite will fly close to the earth tomorrow but not collide with our planet.

Artwork of a meteorite flying near the globe

Space said, that meteorite named 2010 GA6 is relatively small with a diameter of about 22 m. Catalina Sky Survey astronomers in the city of Tucson, Arizona, USA discovered it. The meteorite will move inside the moon's orbit when it flies through the earth at 23h06 GMT on April 8, 6h06 on April 9, Hanoi time. Experts of the US Aeronautics Agency (NASA) claim that people should not worry because meteors cannot harm the planet.

"Every few weeks objects fly over the earth and lie in the orbit of the moon once again ," said Don Yeomans, a researcher at NASA's Near-Earth Objects Office.

At the closest time to Earth, 2010 GA6 will be about 359,000 km from our planet - roughly the distance between the globe and the moon.

This is not the first meteorite to fly close to the earth this year. In January, the 2010 AL30 meteorite flew about 130,000 km from the green planet.

According to Space, NASA regularly monitors meteorites and comets near the globe with a telescope system on the ground and in space. NASA's Spaceguard program was formed to search for dangerous meteors and study their trajectories to see if they were capable of hitting the earth.

In December last year NASA took the telescope called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) into the universe. WISE's mission is to search for meteorites that other telescopes cannot detect because they only emit infrared light. Since its launch, WISE has discovered dozens of meteors every day.