London: NASA has released a map of all the known asteroids that are passing Earth within a close range.
The 1,400 asteroids, whose orbits are given a web-like appearance in the spirograph, are considered fairly dangerous but are not expected to pose an imminent threat for at least another 100 years, Metro.co.uk reported. The "potentially hazardous asteroids" (PHA) are large - estimated at about 460ft or 140m in size - and can reportedly pass within 4.7million miles of the Earth`s orbit. In these terms - that`s pretty close.
NASA said on its website that this "potential" to make close Earth approaches does not mean a PHA will impact the Earth.
It only means there is a possibility for such a threat, they said.
The American space agency said that by monitoring these PHAs and updating their orbits as new observations become available, we can better predict the close-approach statistics and thus their Earth-impact threat.
ANI