FILE – NASA and Lockheed Martin teams celebrate after the sample from the asteroid Bennu landed in the desert of Utah on Sunday. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected pieces from Bennu in 2020.
A stadium-sized asteroid is making a close, but safe fly-by of Earth Tuesday evening, as just another reminder that space is full of flying rocks and Earth must remain on guard.
The 720-foot-wide asteroid known as “2024 ON” is zooming past Earth at 620,000 miles away — close in astronomical terms, but still more than 2.5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. If you’ve got a telescope, it is visible from the Northern Hemisphere on Tuesday night and rates as the brightest asteroid since October 2015.
ASTEROID BREAKS UP OVER PHILIPPINES HOURS AFTER DETECTION
A similar close approach happens on average one time every 10 years, according to the Virtual Telescope Project. However, astronomers have confirmed the asteroid is no threat to Earth and won’t even make a pass as close as 2024’s visit for at least the next 200 years.
Telescopes around the world are constantly scanning the night sky for new discoveries in the name of planetary defense.
EVERYTHING SCIENTISTS WOULD WANT TO KNOW IF AN ASTEROID WAS HEADING TOWARD EARTH
According to the Catalina Sky Survey, there are millions of asteroids within the solar system, with more than 615,000 identified and about 500,000 that need further observations to be classified.
But not all asteroids larger than 1 kilometer across have been found because not all space rocks are so easily detectable by telescopes, perhaps leaving some potential future threats still hidden.