The new house-sized asteroid will fly safely on Earth Wednesday

A newly discovered house-sized asteroid will safely glide across Earth on Wednesday (April 15), departing only within 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).

Based on NASA’s Asteroid Watch program, the 2020 GH2 asteroid is between 43 and 70 feet (13-70 meters) wide, or about the size of a separate home. It was initially found on Saturday (April 11) and has been 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.

Connected: Potentially dangerous asteroids (images)
Plus: Near Earth asteroids: famous flybys and close calls (infographic)

Asteroid 2020 GH2 does not pose an impact hazard to Earth during its flyby. While flying into the moon’s orbit sounds like an asteroid’s close shave, there really is plenty of room.

In a March 31 video shared on Twitter by NASA’s Asteroid Watch group, Kelly Quickly of the agency’s Planetary Defense Office revealed how far away it is. She used a moon-like tennis ball and a basketball from Earth, putting them 25 feet (7 meters) apart in a hallway, the scale distance between Earth and the moon. At that scale, a large asteroid like the one that doomed the dinosaurs is about the size of a grain of salt, Quick said.

“The space is really big” Fast said in the movie , which is part of this NASA In Home job. “A close-approach asteroid is really starting to get closer, perhaps, as it gets closer to the space of these meteorological satellites.” Geostationary meteorological satellites orbit Earth at a distance of approximately 22,000 kilometers (35,000 km).

Not to mention that near Earth asteroids do not pose a possible threat to Earth. NASA Asteroid Watch scientists and scientists around the world regularly observe the skies from known and new asteroids that can pose a threat.

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 found approximately 19,000 near-Earth asteroids, with approximately 30 new asteroids added every week.

And if you believed that the house-sized 2020 GH2 asteroid sounds big, NASA is preparing to fly a much larger asteroid on April 29. On this day, the potentially dangerous 1998 OR2 asteroid will fly across Earth at a safe distance of 3.9 million km (6.2 million km).

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