NASA is tracking a car-sized asteroid that’s soaring past Earth today at around 15,000 miles per hour.
Estimated to measure around 12 feet across, the asteroid known as “2025 DQ” is expected to zoom past our planet at a distance of about 186,000 miles, according to NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
According to the JPL’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the asteroid could be anywhere between around nine and 20 feet in diameter.
2025 DQ is not the only space rock that will be within the vicinity of our planet today. The “2012 DZ”—estimated to be anywhere between around 52 feet and 118 feet in diameter—will also make a close approach this evening, reaching around 662,000 miles from Earth, according to the CNEOS.
Earlier this week on Tuesday, updated data from the CNEOS showed the impact probability of an asteroid known as “2024 YR4” in 2032 was now 3.1 percent, which was “the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger,” the national space agency noted at the time.
However, new data brought the chance of Earth impact on December 22 in 2032 down to just 0.28 percent as of Thursday, NASA said.
Last Thursday on February 13, a bus-sized asteroid skimmed past Earth in the afternoon at around 18,700 miles per hour. Dubbed “2025 CN”, the space rock was estimated to be about 28 feet across, according to the JPL.
Asteroids are small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system nearly 4.6 billion years ago. They’re mostly found concentrated in the main asteroid belt, orbiting around the sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter.
Asteroids have orbits that bring them within 120 million miles of the sun. Most near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids that range in size from around 10 feet to nearly 25 miles across.
“The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don’t bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact,” NASA says.
However, a small portion of them, known as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) require closer attention. Potentially hazardous asteroids measure more than about 460 feet in size and have orbits that bring them as close as within 4.6 million miles of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, NASA says.
Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none of them are likely to hit Earth any time soon.
“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 the CNEOS, previously told Newsweek.
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