NASA is monitoring a car-sized asteroid that’s expected to zip past Earth tomorrow morning at around 28,655 miles per hour.
The space rock known as “2025 FM18,” estimated to be about 15 feet across, will soar past our planet at a distance of around 172,000 miles, according to NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
2025 FM18 isn’t the only asteroid that will be within the vicinity of Earth tomorrow. NASA is also tracking an airplane-sized space rock known as “2025 FP6,” which is estimated to be around 79 feet across.
2025 FP6 is expected to make a close approach tomorrow afternoon at around 4.6 million miles from Earth, according to NASA.
Asteroids—small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago—are found concentrated in the main asteroid belt, orbiting around the sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter.
The orbits of asteroids bring them within 120 million miles of the sun. Most near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids that range in size from about 10 feet to almost 25 miles across.
Earlier this year in February, new data from NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies found that the impact probability of the asteroid known as “2024 YR4” in 2032 was at 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, further studies on the asteroid’s trajectory later the same month brought the chance of Earth impact on December 22 in 2032 down to 0.004 percent. In a blog post on February 24, NASA said that according to the data, “there is no significant potential for this asteroid to impact our planet for the next century.”
The space agency added that “NASA has significantly lowered the risk of near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 as an impact threat to Earth for the foreseeable future” and “the range of possible locations the asteroid could be on Dec. 22, 2032, has moved farther away from the Earth.”
NASA warned, however, that a “very small chance” still remains for asteroid 2024 YR4 to impact the Moon on that date and that probability is currently 1.7 percent.
“The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don’t bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact,” the space agency explains.
However, a small portion of them, known as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), do require closer observation. Measuring around 460 feet in size, PHAs have orbits that bring them as close as within 4.6 million miles of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, NASA says.
“Not all NEOs are potentially hazardous, but all hazardous objects are NEOs,” Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom, told Newsweek last year.
Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none 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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