28-05-2025
NASA monitoring trio of house-sized asteroids skimming Earth at hypersonic speed
This week, five asteroids will fly past Earth, close enough to be categorized as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). However, NASA predicts that none will pose any real risk to the planet for another hundred years.
Known as "Potentially Hazardous Asteroids" (PHAs), these pieces of cosmic debris come within 4.6 million miles of the planet.
There are over 1,400 PHAs in our system as of early 2013, with diameters ranging from 460 feet.
Today, May 26, asteroid "2025 KT1" will miss Earth by 1,240,681 miles. And four more are coming this week, about the size of a house.
Last Thursday, '2025 KH' flew past Earth with a diameter of 37 feet at 25,000 miles per hour, just 687,000 miles away. Though an impressive distance, on NASA's map, it's 'just next door.'
"2025 KT1" will pass Earth at about double that distance today with a diameter of 42.1 feet. Tomorrow, May 27, "2025 JP" is scheduled to fly by 3,190,383 miles away from Planet Earth with a diameter of 83.1 feet. On May 28, three asteroids will burn past our planet: 2025 KW, 2025 JR, and 2025 KU1.
Asteroids pass Earth all the time. Unless they come within a certain distance, however, they don't signal NASA's radar as potentially threatening. According to USA Today, NASA's survey telescopes find over 3,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) every year.
According to Newsweek, NASA spotted the closest PHA with a scheduled flyby in 2032. With a diameter of 200 feet, or the height of a 15-story building, 2024 YR4 had the highest impact probability that NASA had ever recorded of this size or larger back in February of this year.
However, it went from a 3.1 percent to a .004 percent chance.
No significant asteroid risks are heading to Earth for the next century. There's still a slight chance that YR 2024 will impact the Moon.
The Chicxulub impactor, at 6.2 miles in diameter, hit Earth at 40,000 mph and killed the dinosaurs with the energy of three billion WWII-era atomic bombs, CNN reported.
An asteroid that large, over 330 feet in diameter, strikes Earth about every 10,000 years, according to NASA's predictions via USA Today.
Ceres is currently the largest asteroid in our system, with a radius of 296 miles. In the grand scheme of things, if the Earth were the size of a nickel, Ceres would be about the size of a poppy seed. So, asteroids constitute a significant part of our solar system and come in all shapes and sizes.
According to NASA's website, asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the sun. When our solar system began 4.6 billion years ago, most of the material fell to the center of a collapsed big cloud of gas and dust, forming the sun.
Asteroid bodies have always been present and will always be an integral moving part of our cosmic lives. However, they can come too close at times, especially this week.
Still, NASA doesn't foresee any asteroid body flying by within a truly threatening distance anytime in the next century.
"But tiny meteors burn up in Earth's atmosphere all the time!" NASA explained.
