In what is becoming a common situation, since we do not have enough problems to solve on Earth, another huge object in space is pointed at us. CTV news says that NASA is reporting on a “massive asteroid”, maybe bigger than two football fields, is approaching our location and will pass by Earth tomorrow, at Christmas. Known as asteroid 501647 and also called “2014 SD224”, the asteroid will be closest to Earth around 15:20 ET. The good news is that the asteroid will not come into contact with Earth and the closest it will come is 1.8 million miles from the surface.
For those who keep records at home, this means that the asteroid is a fraction of the size of what is seen in popular disaster movies. Take Deep Impact, for example, which has 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, as seen in Armageddon, was even larger, measuring 600 miles in length and requiring the expertise of Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.
It is noteworthy that the asteroid 501647, first observed in August 2014, is classified as NEO (Near-Earth Object) and NASA even classified it as a “potentially dangerous” Near-Earth object. It looks like NASA will be monitoring its course throughout the day. For clarification, “potentially dangerous” objects near Earth are not designated as such because of how close they could be to our planet, but because of their size. The site also reports that two other NEOs are ready to fly past Earth, but are much smaller than asteroid 501647 and “do not pose a threat to Earth.”
The news about this asteroid comes a few weeks after NASA revealed that “an object of unknown origin” would have skated near Earth in the early morning of December 1. 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 sky, it was confirmed that this NEO was a Centaur rocket booster from the 1960s. This marked the second time that a rocket stage from a previous launch had been caught in Earth orbit in 2002. Saturn V rocket from Apollo 12 apparently passed our planet.
(Cover photo of CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT / PHOTO SCIENCE LIBRARY)