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A newly discovered house-sized asteroid will safely glide across Earth on Wednesday (April 15), passing just inside the moon’s orbit.
Asteroid 2020 GH2 will pass Earth at a distance of approximately 223,000 miles (359,000 kilometers). The average distance from Earth to the moon is approximately 239,000 miles (385,000 km).
According to NASA’s asteroid surveillance program, the 2020 GH2 asteroid is between 43 and 70 feet (13-70 meters) wide, or about the size of a single-family home. It was first discovered on Saturday (April 11) and is being tracked by astronomers at various observatories, including the Catalina Sky Survey at Mount Lemmon in Arizona, according to the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Related: Potentially dangerous asteroids (images)
Plus: Near Earth asteroids: famous flybys and close calls (infographic)
Asteroid 2020 GH2 does not pose an impact risk to Earth during its flyby. While flying into the moon’s orbit sounds like an asteroid’s close shave, there’s actually plenty of room.
In a March 31 video shared on Twitter by NASA’s Asteroid Watch group, Kelly Fast of the agency’s Planetary Defense Office demonstrated the amount of space available. She used a tennis ball like the moon and a basketball like the Earth, placing them 25 feet (7 meters) apart in a hallway, the scale distance between Earth and the moon. At that scale, a huge asteroid like the one that doomed the dinosaurs would be the size of a grain of salt, Fast said.
“The space is quite big” Fast said in the video, which is part of the NASA At Home project. “A close-up asteroid is really starting to get closer, perhaps, as it gets closer to the distance from the meteorological satellites.” Geostationary meteorological satellites orbit Earth at a distance of approximately 22,000 miles (35,000 km).
That does not mean that near Earth asteroids do not pose a potential threat to Earth. NASA Asteroid Watch scientists and other scientists around the world regularly scan the skies for new and known asteroids that may pose a danger to Earth.
Any asteroid approximately 500 feet (140 m) or larger with an orbit that brings it closer to 4.7 million miles (7.5 million km) from Earth is classified as a potentially dangerous asteroid, NASA officials said. As of 2019, scientists have discovered around 19,000 near-Earth asteroids, with approximately 30 new asteroids added every week.
And if you thought house-sized 2020 GH2 asteroid sounds big, NASA is gearing up for an even bigger asteroid to fly on April 29. On that day, the potentially dangerous 1998 OR2 asteroid will fly across Earth a safe distance of 3.9 million miles (6.2 million km).
Email Tariq Malik at [email protected] or follow him @tariqjmalik. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Instagram.
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