Large Asteroid to Brush By Earth This Fall

U.S. astronomers said an asteroid the size of a small city will pass near the Earth on Sept. 29, in the closest approach of a large space rock this century.

The asteroid, called Toutatis, follows a four-year orbit around the sun that takes it near Earth periodically, SPACE.com reported Monday. The Web site said an Internet rumor has arisen that the asteroid will strike Earth this fall — a prospect that astronomers say is untrue.

Toutatis is a dumbbell-shaped asteroid nearly 3 miles long and about 1.5 miles wide. This fall, it will pass within about 1 million miles of Earth — about four times the distance to the moon.

Astronomers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the orbit of Toutatis is known with better precision than any other large asteroid known to cross Earth’s orbit. Toutatis has not been so near since the year 1353 and will not approach this closely again until 2562, NASA’s astronomers have calculated.

No other asteroid so large is known to have come so close in the past, though accurate tracking of space rocks is a fairly recent, high-tech skill that still leaves wide margins of error for many objects, they said.