A “potentially hazardous” skyscraper-sized asteroid will pass our planet next week, NASA said.
The asteroid, named 2024 ON, is expected to pass within 620,000 miles of Earth’s surface on Tuesday, September 17 at 10:19 UTC (11:01 BST).
2024 ON has a diameter of between 220 and 480 meters, meaning it could be almost as large as One World Trade Center in New York.
When it flies past Earth, it will be traveling at 8.8 km per second, or 19,685 miles per hour – about 25 times the speed of sound.
The asteroid is ‘potentially hazardous’, but fortunately it is not expected to pose a danger to our planet and its inhabitants.
2024 ON has a diameter between 721 and 1,575 feet (220 to 480 meters), meaning it could be nearly as tall as New York’s One World Trade Center (1,776 feet tall)
An asteroid is considered “potentially hazardous” if it is within 0.05 astronomical units (4.65 million miles) of Earth and has a diameter of more than 459 feet (140 meters).
Although the asteroid is more than twice as far from the moon at the time of its approach, it is still considered a close-to-Earth object (NEO) and is being tracked by the space agency.
“NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been pushed into orbits by the gravity of nearby planets that allow them to reach the vicinity of Earth,” according to NASA.
Comets are composed primarily of water ice with embedded dust grains and originally formed in the cold outer planetary system, while most rocky asteroids formed in the warmer inner solar system, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
‘The scientific interest in comets and asteroids is largely due to their status as relatively unchanged remnants of the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.’
The asteroid, named 2024 ON, is expected to come within 620,000 miles of Earth’s surface on Tuesday at 10:19 UTC (11:01 BST) (artist’s rendering)
NASA names 2024 ON as one of the upcoming approaches on its online tracker, which collects objects that are getting closer to Earth.
Unfortunately, this asteroid is too small to be seen with the naked eye or even a moderate telescope.
At a maximum diameter of 480 meters, 2024 ON is actually tiny compared to the largest known asteroid, Ceres, which has a diameter of 930 kilometers (more than 910,000 meters).
Asteroids – large boulders left over from collisions in the ancient solar system – move at high speeds because of the enormous gravitational pull on them.
While the asteroids orbit the Sun in ‘elliptical’ (elongated) orbits, they also rotate irregularly and tumble.