In what is becoming a regular occurrence, since we don’t have enough problems to deal with on Earth, another giant object in space is apparently headed right for us. CTV News brings word that NASA reports of a “massive asteroid” perhaps larger than two football fields is closing in on our location and will be passing by Earth tomorrow, Christmas Day. Known as asteroid 501647 and also designated as “2014 SD224,” the asteroid will be at its closest to Earth at around 3:20 P.M. ET. The good news is that the asteroid is not going to make contact with Earth and the closest it will come is within 1.8 million miles of the surface.
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For those keeping track at home, that means that the asteroid is a fraction of the size of one seen in popular disaster films. Take for example Deep Impact, which features a comet that is seven miles wide. The current asteroid is estimated to be between 92 and 210 meters (300 to 689 feet), making it roughly 2% the size of that famous space object. The asteroid as seen in Armageddon was even bigger though, measuring 600 miles in length and requiring the expertise of Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.
Of note is that asteroid 501647, first spotted in August of 2014, is classified as an NEO (Near-Earth Object) and NASA has even classified it as a “potentially hazardous” Near-Earth Object. NASA will apparently be monitoring its course throughout the day. For clarification, “potentially hazardous” Near-Earth Objects are not designated as such because of how close they might be to hitting our planet but because of their size. The site also reports that two other NEOs are set to fly past Earth but they’re much smaller than asteroid 501647 and “pose no threat to Earth.”
News of this asteroid comes weeks after NASA revealed “an object of unknown origin” would skate past Earth in the early morning of December 1. Though it made headlines and spread around the internet because of the salaciousness of that phrasing, the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a theory about what the object was but couldn’t confirm it until it passed by. After it cleared the skies it was confirmed that this NEO was 1960’s-Era Centaur rocket booster. This marked the second time that a rocket stage from a previous launch was caught in the orbit of the Earth as back in 2002 part of the Saturn V rocket from Apollo 12 seemingly passed our planet as well.
(Cover photo by CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)
