Don’t panic, but a stadium-sized asteroid will pass ‘close’ by Earth. Because 2020
If there’s anything we don’t need right now, it’s a giant asteroid about the size of a football stadium crashing down to Earth.
But don’t worry, the giant rocky object more than 1,000 feet in diameter will keep a safe distance as it soars past Earth Saturday, roughly 3 million miles away, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s “close approaches” list.
The 4.6 billion-year-old asteroid goes by the name 2002 NN4.
“In short, 2002 NN4 is a very well-known asteroid with a known orbit that will pass Earth at a (very) safe distance,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory spokesman Ian J. O’Neill told USA Today.
Near-Earth objects (NEOs) “of particular interest” occur when an object passes somewhere between Earth and the moon, according to NASA. This distance is known as the “lunar distance (LD).” One LD is about 240,000 miles.
The asteroid passing over Earth this weekend is 13.25 LDs away, or about 13 times farther than the moon is to us.
This means earthlings are safe from catastrophic damage, especially since the enormous object is traveling at about 25,000 miles per hour, according to NASA’s numbers.
2002 NN4 is also said to be bigger than about 90% of asteroids, Derek Buzasi, a physics professor at the Florida Gulf Coast University, told USA Today.
Typically, the larger the asteroid, the easier it is to track, Buzasi added.
Small asteroids a handful of feet across are found passing between Earth and the moon several times a month. And meteoroids — tiny fragments of asteroids and comets — crash through the atmosphere every day, NASA said.
But “no known asteroid poses a significant risk of impact with Earth over the next 100 years,” the agency said.
The only known “high risk” impact scheduled to hit Earth 165 years from now has a 1 in 714 chance of crashing into the planet, NASA said. That’s a less than 0.2% chance.
This story was originally published June 4, 2020 at 12:34 PM with the headline "Don’t panic, but a stadium-sized asteroid will pass ‘close’ by Earth. Because 2020."
