A new record is made as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently tracked what is said to be the largest asteroid near earth, and in this case, specifically over France, according to UPI.
The asteroid was within 4,390,892 miles from the earth, “approximately 18 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.”
“While many known asteroids have passed by closer to Earth than Florence will on September 1, all of those were estimated to be smaller,” said NASA scientist Paul Chodas.
Named after war nurse Florence Nightingale, the asteroid is between 2.5 and 5.6 miles wide.
More details can be found here.

While the asteroid that passed by Earth on Friday morning was more than four million miles away, A NASA slide depicts the catastrophic collision of a massive comet or asteroid with earth 250 million years ago, which appears to be the reason 90 percent of all marine species and 70 percent of all land vertebrates abruptly died out. (Credit: D. Davis/NASA/UPI)
Filed Under: Aerospace + defense