NASA is keeping a close eye on a bus-sized asteroid, which is expected to pass by Earth on Saturday at a distance only slightly from the moon.
Officials from the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) estimate that the space rock is between 8 and 18 meters wide and will streak past our planet at a speed of about 46,000 kilometers per o’clock.
It will come within 430,000 kilometers of Earth. For comparison, the average distance between our planet and the moon is about 238,900 miles.
The encounter is expected to occur in the early morning hours, but the asteroid poses no threat to Earth.
The space rock, called 2024 VK3, is just one of five asteroids that will fly by our planet this weekend.
Three are about the size of commercial airplanes and one is about the size of a house, according to NASA JPL.
The next encounter will be with the airplane-sized asteroid 2024 VZ2, which will pass 750,000 miles from our planet.
The others will maintain distances of well over a million kilometers, with the house-sized asteroid 2024 UC5 at a distance of 2,580,000 kilometers at its closest point to Earth.
NASA is keeping a close eye on a bus-sized asteroid, which is expected to pass by Earth tomorrow morning at a distance only slightly away from the moon
All of these asteroids are considered Near Earth Objects (NEOs) because they are within about 50 million kilometers of our planet.
NASA has observed, documented, and classified approximately 36,000 objects in the solar system as NEOs.
The space agency tracks NEOs primarily to identify asteroids that could potentially collide with Earth and assess the threat they pose.
NASA uses several methods to examine nearby space rocks, including both ground-based and space-based telescopes.
A key tool is the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, an infrared space telescope used to discover and characterize potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs).
PHAs are asteroids that have a high probability of making a close approach to Earth and are large enough to cause significant damage if they impact.
Technically, this means any space rock that is within 0.05 astronomical units (or about 4,647,790 miles) of Earth’s orbit and has an absolute brightness of 22.0 or less.
Absolute brightness is an indirect measurement of an asteroid’s size. Lower magnitude values indicate greater brightness and therefore larger objects.
In 2021, NASA’s Planetary Defense Office launched the DART mission, where a spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos and changed the space rock’s trajectory (STOCK)
None of the asteroids passing by Earth this weekend are considered PHAs.
But NASA is preparing for the unlikely event that a PHA will hurtle towards our planet in the future.
The agency’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) develops technologies and strategies that could protect Earth from a catastrophic asteroid impact.
Founded in 2016, PDCO’s mission is to find, track and better understand asteroids and comets that could pose an impact hazard to Earth.
In 2021, the agency launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), in which a spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos and successfully changed the space rock’s trajectory.
This mission was a test of the “kinetic impact” asteroid deflection strategy, which could one day be used to send a PHA on a collision course with Earth.
In October, the European Space Agency launched the second phase of this mission, called Hera.
The Hera spacecraft is currently en route to Dimorphos to conduct a detailed post-impact survey of Dimorphos. This will help experts consolidate the kinetic impact into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defense technique.