NASA announced on Tuesday that it is monitoring a “potentially hazardous,” giant, peanut-shaped asteroid passing relatively close to Earth.
“The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don’t bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact, but a small fraction of them – called potentially hazardous asteroids – require more attention. These objects are defined as asteroids that are more than about 460 feet (140 meters) in size with orbits that bring them as close as within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers) of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. [The Center for Near Earth Object Studies] continuously monitors all known near-Earth objects to assess any impact risk they may pose,” reads NASA’s Asteroid Watch website.
The space agency said that the asteroid, named 2024 ON, “does not pose a hazard to Earth for the foreseeable future,” so there’s no need for Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to suit up just yet.
NASA used radar to discover the asteroid, which measures roughly 750 feet long. The asteroid appears to be rotating, completing 90% of a single rotation in about six hours. The peanut shape suggests that the asteroid has two lobes. At least 14% of near-Earth asteroids that are larger than 660 feet are shaped this way, which is called a “contact binary” shape.
2024 ON was discovered by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System on Mauna Loa in Hawaii on July 27.
Fox News reports on the massive asteroid moving at around 20,000 miles per hour. Here’s the start of the story:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is monitoring a “potentially hazardous” asteroid that is moving past Earth on Tuesday.
NASA told Fox News Digital that the rocky object, which has been named 2024 ON, is 350 meters long by 180 meters wide, which roughly equals 1,150 feet by 590 feet – larger than previous estimates.
NASA has deemed the asteroid “stadium-sized” and reported it was 621,000 miles away from Earth on Tuesday morning, which is considered relatively close. Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Fox News Digital that an asteroid of this size coming this close to Earth only happens every five to ten years.
Farnocchia, who works at the laboratory’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said that the last time a large meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere was in Russia in 2013. Earth has not been hit by a meteor of 2024 ON’s size since prehistoric times.
Although the asteroid is close enough to Earth to be deemed a “potentially hazardous object,” Farnocchia said there is no chance the asteroid will hit Earth. The asteroid would need to be within a couple of hundred miles to be a concern.