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You may have read this week an “asteroid the size of the largest building in the world rushing toward Earth at over 56,000 mph.” Some news sites even add “NASA confirms”. Most of these things are technically correct, but the most important point is left out.
Asteroid 153201 (2000 WO107) will miss Earth by nearly 2.7 million miles on Sunday. Observations of the asteroid also place its size somewhere between four football fields. This large variance comes from the difficulty in determining the size of relatively small objects so far.
What makes me scratch my head is why this Near Earth Object (NEO) is getting so much attention. Far more interesting are the trio of NEOs that will approach Earth (safely again) on Thanksgiving Day. This includes the asteroid 2018 RQ4, which will be 10 times closer than Sunday’s.
Planetary defense
In 2005, Congress assigned NASA the goal of finding 90% of near-Earth asteroids approximately 140 meters or larger in size. The space agency responded to that call with NASA’s Center for the Study of Near-Earth Objects, which tracks this and other near-Earth objects.
The next time you see a claim for an asteroid heading towards Earth, you can see the data for yourself from the center’s latest information on upcoming near approaches.
Data there shows close approaches (CA) at about 19 lunar distances (LD) over the next 60 days. Any near-Earth object with a number greater than one in the “CA minimum distance LD” column has no chance of hitting the Moon, let alone the Earth.
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