A bus-sized asteroid is due to zip past our planet today, skimming closer to us than our own moon.
The asteroid, named 2024 WF5, is estimated by NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) to be between 19.7 and 42.7 feet across.
For reference, U.S. school buses are between 35 and 45 feet long, while a semitrailer is about 48 feet long.
2024 WF5 will pass us at a distance of 104,000 miles, over twice as close to the Earth as the 238,900-mile orbit of the moon.
The asteroid will zoom past much faster than a speeding bullet: while a rifle bullet can travel up to around 2,700 mph, 2024 WF5 has a speed of about 47,870 mph.
“Asteroids are ‘bits of a planet that didn’t happen’ that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt,” Jay Tate, the director of the Spaceguard Center observatory in the U.K., previously told Newsweek.
“However, as they are relatively small, asteroids can be disturbed quite easily, so they can develop orbits that cross those of planets.”
There are also four other asteroids passing the Earth’s astronomical neighborhood in the coming days.
Today, the 43-foot, house-sized 2024 WZ will zoom past at a distance of 899,000 miles, while bus-sized 2018 DC4, estimated to be about 39 feet across, will pass 4,470,000 miles away.
Tomorrow, 55-foot 2024 WS and 80-foot 2019 JN2 will pass us at distances of 1,460,000 miles and 2,230,000 miles, respectively.
Our closest caller, 2024 WF5, is classified as one of over 36,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) that scientists have identified to date. NEOs are defined as coming within within 30 million miles of Earth.
“Asteroids and comets with a perihelion distance (closest to the Sun) less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU), or approximately 120 million miles, are called near-Earth objects—or NEOs,” Svetla Ben-Itzhak, an assistant professor of space and international relations at Johns Hopkins University, previously told Newsweek.
Some NEOs are further categorized as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) or potentially hazardous objects (PHOs). These objects are defined as coming within 4.6 million miles from the sun, and being larger than 460 feet in diameter.
“The ‘potentially hazardous’ designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid’s orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact,” Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, previously told Newsweek.
There are at least 2,300 PHAs currently being tracked by CNEOS.
2024 WF5, along with the four other close approaches this weekend, are only NEOs and not PHAs, due to their smaller size.
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