NASA is monitoring a bus-sized asteroid that’s expected to zoom past our planet tonight at around 19,000 miles per hour, according to the space agency’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
The asteroid known as “2021 R16,” which measures around 23 feet in diameter, will make its closest approach at around 2.41 million miles from Earth, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
2021 R16 is not the only space rock within the vicinity of our planet today. Two others, including a 660 feet-wide one known as “2022 SW12” and another, about 21 feet wide, known as “2025 SP3,” made their closest approaches earlier this morning, with 2025 SP3 coming as close as 255,000 miles from Earth, the CNEOS notes.
NASA is also tracking a 420 feet-wide asteroid (called “2018 QT1”) and one 71 feet in diameter (called “2025 SR3), which are due to come as close as 3.13 million miles and 3.99 million miles, respectively, later today.
Asteroids are small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. They are found concentrated in the main asteroid belt, which lies around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. So-called “near-Earth objects” are those asteroids whose orbits bring them within 120 million miles of the sun.
Earlier this year in February, data from the CNEOS showed 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 said at the time.
Following further observations, NASA concluded that “the object poses no significant impact risk to Earth in 2032 and beyond,” the space agency said in a blog post in June.
Experts at the JPL have since been able to refine their knowledge of where the asteroid will be on December 22, 2032 by nearly 20 percent. “As a result, the asteroid’s probability of impacting the Moon has slightly increased from 3.8 percent to 4.3 percent,” NASA said, adding that “in the small chance that the asteroid were to impact, it would not alter the Moon’s orbit.”
According to NASA, “Asteroid 2024 YR4 is now too far away to observe with either space or ground-based telescopes. The space agency expects to make further observations when the asteroid’s orbit around the Sun brings it back into the vicinity of Earth in 2028.
“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), do require closer tracking. 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 explains.
Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none is 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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