Newfound asteroid the size of a house will fly safely by Earth Wednesday - Latest News

A newly discovered asteroid about the size of a home will zip safely by Earth on Wednesday (April 15), departure only inside the orbit of the moon.

The asteroid 2020 GH2 will pass Earth at a range of about 223,000 miles (359,000 kilometers). The average distance from the Earth to the moon is all roughly 239,000 miles (385,000 km).

Based on NASA’s Asteroid Watch program, asteroid 2020 GH2 is about between 43 and 70 ft (13-70 meters) wide, or about the size of a detached home. It was initially found on Saturday (April 11) and has been tracked by astronomers at several observatories, including the Catalina Sky Survey at Mount Lemmon in Arizona, in accordance with the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Connected: Potentially dangerous asteroids (images)
More: Near-Earth asteroids: Famous flybys & close calls (infographic)

This NASA graphic depicts the orbits of the Earth, the moon and the asteroid 2020 GH2 during its Earth flyby on April 15, 2020. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Asteroid 2020 GH2 poses no impact danger to Earth during its flyby. While flying inside the moon’s orbit sounds like a close shave by an asteroid, there’s really a great deal of room.

In a March 31 video shared on Twitter by NASA’s Asteroid Watch group, Kelly Quickly of the agency’s Planetary Defense Office revealed just how much distance is out there. She used a tennis ball as the moon and a basketball since the Earth, putting them 25 feet (7 meters) apart in a hallway — the scale distance between the Earth and moon. At that scale, a huge asteroid such as the one that doomed the dinosaurs are the size of a grain of salt, Quick said.

“Space is really big,” Fast said in the movie , which is part of this NASA In Home job . “A close-approach asteroid is really starting to get close, perhaps, when it gets within the space of these weather satellites.” Geostationary weather satellites orbit the Earth at a distance of approximately 22,000 kilometers (35,000 km).

That is not to mention that near-Earth asteroids do not represent a possible threat to Earth. NASA’s Asteroid Watch scientists and scientists around the globe regularly observe the skies for asteroids that are known and new that may pose a threat.

Any asteroid roughly 500 ft (140 m) or bigger with an orbit which brings it within 4.7 million miles (7.5 million kilometers ) of Earth is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid, NASA officials have said. As of 2019, scientists have found approximately 19,000 near-Earth asteroids, with about 30 newfound asteroids added every week.

And if you believed that the house-sized asteroid 2020 GH2 sounds big, NASA is gearing up for a much bigger asteroid to fly on April 29. On this day, the potentially hazardous asteroid 1998 OR2 will fly by Earth at a safe distance of 3.9 million kilometers (6.2 million km).

Mail Tariq Malik in tmalik@space.com or trace @tariqjmalik. Practice us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.

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