An Asteroid Gets Its Close-Up As Geminids Light Up The Sky

"This week, the skywatchers will experience a flashy double feature: The Geminid meteor shower — one of the year's best — will coincide with an unusually close encounter by an asteroid."

"That asteroid? It's called 3200 Phaethon, discovered by a NASA satellite in 1983. With a diameter of about 3 miles, it's the third-largest near-Earth asteroid classified by the space agency as 'potentially hazardous.'"

"On Saturday, Phaethon will come within 0.069 astronomical units — about 6.4 million miles — of Earth. That is when NASA plans to take detailed radar images of the asteroid at its Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in the Mojave Desert and at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico."

"NASA says this encounter with Phaethon is the Earth's closest since 1974, and the closest it will be until 2093."