NASA says a bus-sized asteroid is about to make a close approach, coming within 148,000 miles of Earth. According to the space agency, the asteroid, named 2024 UQ1, measures approximately 32-feet across.
Astronomers and scientists are constantly on the lookout for large space rocks that could pose a threat to Earth. ATLAS, an asteroid impact early warning system in Hawaii, recently spotted a small asteroid that will temporarily orbit Earth during October and November, essentially becoming a mini moon. While that asteroid, named 2024 PT5, will come as close as about 620,000 miles of Earth, asteroid 2024 UQ1 is expected to get as close as 148,000 miles, a distance closer than the moon.
Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are not an uncommon occurrence. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory classifies a near-Earth object as any asteroid or comet with orbits that bring them to within 120 million miles of the Sun, meaning they reside in Earth’s orbital neighborhood. Most range in size from about 10 feet to nearly 25 miles across.
While a bus-sized asteroid zipping past Earth as close as 148,000 miles away may seem like a reason to be alarmed, NASA does not classify it as being potentially hazardous. A potentially hazardous asteroid is defined as one being about 460-feet wide (building-size) with orbits that bring them within 4.6 million miles of Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
“A potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is one that has an orbit intersecting the Earth’s orbit around the Sun by less than 0.05 astronomical units (1 AU is the distance to the Sun), that’s just over 4.5 million miles. It also has to have an absolute brightness of 22.0 or less (lower values of the magnitude are brighter = larger objects), ie. an asteroid (or comet) that would cause significant regional damage if it hit the Earth,” Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the U.K., remarked in a past interview with Newsweek.
Asteroid 2024 UQ1 is not the only NEO to be making an appearance this week. An airplane-sized asteroid will come within 2.5 million miles of Earth today, while another bus-sized asteroid, and two building-sized asteroids will also make near-Earth passes on Monday. None of the asteroids pose any danger to Earth.