New interstellar comet will keep a safe distance from Earth, NASA says

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA has discovered an interstellar comet that’s wandered into our backyard.

The space agency spotted the quick-moving object with the Atlas telescope in Chile earlier this week, and confirmed it was a comet from another star system.

It’s officially the third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system and poses no threat to Earth.

“These things take millions of years to go from one stellar neighborhood to another, so this thing has likely been traveling through space for hundreds of millions of years, even billions of years,” Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, said Thursday. “We don’t know, and so we can’t predict which star it came from.”

The newest visitor is 416 million miles (670 million kilometers) from the sun, out near Jupiter, and heading this way at a blistering 37 miles (59 kilometers) per second.

NASA said the comet will make its closest approach to the sun in late October, scooting between the orbits of Mars and Earth — but closer to the red planet than us at a safe 150 million miles (240 million kilometers) away.