NASA Tracking House-Sized Asteroids Approaching Earth Imminently

Newsweek

22-05-2025

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NASA is monitoring three asteroids in the vicinity of the Earth that are zipping through space at around 16,000 to 41,000 miles per hour.
A bus-sized asteroid known as "2025 KH," measuring around 37 feet in diameter, soared past the Earth on Thursday morning at over 25,000 miles per hour, coming as close as within 687,000 miles from our planet, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
A larger, house-sized space rock, known as "2025 KE1," approximately 58 feet in diameter, is due to zoom past the Earth early Friday morning. The asteroid will zip by at over 41,000 miles per hour, coming within just 120,000 miles from the Earth, according to the JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
The national space agency is also tracking a slightly smaller house-sized asteroid, called "2025 KC," that's around 52 feet in diameter. It is expected to fly past at over 16,000 miles per hour, reaching within 636,000 miles from planet Earth, the JPL notes.
Stock image: An asteroid approaching the Earth, with an inset image showing a school bus in front of a house.
Stock image: An asteroid approaching the Earth, with an inset image showing a school bus in front of a house.
Getty
Back in April, an asteroid known as "2024 YR4" was approximated to be around 200 feet by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. "That's just about the height of a 15-story building," Andy Rivkin, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, noted in a NASA blog post on April 2.
Earlier this year in February, data from the CNEOS indicated that the impact probability of 2024 YR4 in 2032 was at 3.1 percent, marking "the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger," the space agency noted at the time.
Further studies that month, however, brought that asteroid's chance of Earth impact on December 22 in 2032 down to 0.004 percent. The data showed there is "no significant potential" for 2024 YR4 to "impact our planet for the next century," NASA advised in a blog post on February 24.
However, there is still a "very small chance" for 2024 YR4 to impact the Moon on that date and that probability is currently 1.7 percent, NASA noted.
Asteroids are small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system around 4.6 billion years ago. They are found concentrated in the main asteroid belt, orbiting around the sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter.
The orbits of these space rocks bring them within 120 million miles of the sun. Most near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids ranging in size from about 10 feet to almost 25 miles across.
"The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don't bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact," NASA says.
However, a small portion of them, known as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), do require close monitoring. Measuring over 460 feet in size, PHAs have orbits that bring them as close as within 4.6 million miles of the Earth's orbit around the sun, NASA explains.
Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none of them are likely to hit Earth any time soon.
"The 'potentially hazardous' designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of the CNEOS, previously told Newsweek.
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