In what is increasingly common, since we don’t have enough problems to deal with on Earth, another gigantic object in space is apparently heading straight for us. CTV News reports that NASA reports of a “massive asteroid,” perhaps larger than two football fields, is approaching our location and will pass Earth tomorrow, Christmas Day. Known as asteroid 501647 and also referred to as “2014 SD224,” the asteroid will be closest to Earth around 3:20 PM ET. The good news is that the asteroid will not make contact with Earth and will come closest within 1.8 million miles of the surface.
For those who keep track of it at home, that means the asteroid is a fraction of the size seen in popular disaster movies. Take Deep Impact, for example, with 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 about 2% the size of that famous space object. The asteroid seen at Armageddon, however, was even larger: it was 600 miles long and required the expertise of Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.
It should be noted that asteroid 501647, first observed in August 2014, has been classified as a NEO (Near-Earth Object) and NASA has even classified it as a “potentially dangerous” Near-Earth Object. NASA will apparently follow its course all day long. To clarify, “potentially dangerous” Near-Earth Objects are not identified as such because of how close they could be to hitting our planet, but because of their size. The site also reports that two other NEOs are about to pass Earth, but they are much smaller than asteroid 501647 and “pose no threat to Earth.”
The news of this asteroid comes weeks after NASA revealed that “an object of unknown origin” would skim Earth on the early morning of December 1. Although it made headlines and spread across the internet for the scandalousness of that formulation, the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a theory of what the object was, but could not confirm it until it passed. After clearing the skies, this NEO was confirmed to be a 1960s Centaur missile supercharger. This was the second time a rocket stage from a previous launch has been caught in Earth’s orbit, as in 2002 part of Apollo 12’s Saturn V rocket seemingly passed our planet as well.
(Cover photo by CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)