A car-sized asteroid will pass at about half the distance between Earth and the moon tonight (Dec. 6), concluding a busy week for asteroid watchers all over the world.
The roughly 15-foot-wide (4.6 meters) asteroid, designated 2024 XS2, will make its closest approach to Earth for the next 10 years tonight at 9:47 p.m. EST (0247 GMT on Saturday, Dec. 7).
2024 XS2 will pass just 122,000 miles (196,000 kilometers) away from our planet and will be bright enough to be visible in long-exposure photographs taken by amateur telescopes, according to TheSkyLive. (For comparison: The moon orbits Earth at an average distance of about 238,900 miles, or 384,500 km).
However, if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the viewing conditions won't be great: The asteroid will make its closest approach while traversing the southern sky between two constellations, the Dolphinfish and Reticulum.
Related: What are asteroids?
2024 XS2, discovered in March of this year, belongs to the Apollo class of asteroids, the most numerous group of near-Earth space rocks, which approach the sun closer than Earth does, crossing its orbit along the way.
Tonight's close approach takes place only three days after a 28-inch-wide (70 centimeters) space rock exploded into a spectacular fireball above Siberia. Multiple photographers in the city of Oleminsk, near which pieces of this space rock are believed to have landed, captured the event, which took place at 1:15 a.m. local time on Dec. 4 (11.15 am EST on Dec. 3).
The impact of that asteroid, since named C0WEPC5, was the fourth in 2024 and 11th overall that had been successfully predicted and observed based on previous orbital calculations.
A much larger space rock, once thought a potential hazard to Earth, safely missed the planet only hours after C0WEPC5 slammed into us. That space rock, the more than 1,000-foot-wide (300 meters) 2020 XR, made its closest approach to the planet on Dec. 4 at 12:27 a.m. EST (0527 GMT), passing 1.37 million miles (2.2 million km) — about six Earth-moon distances — away from Earth.
Astronomers currently monitor about 34,000 near-Earth asteroids, which pass within 28 million miles (45 million km) of Earth's orbit. A near-Earth asteroid wider than 460 feet (140 m) that approaches closer than 4,650,000 miles (7,480,000 km) to Earth’s orbit is deemed potentially hazardous. Astronomers currently monitor about 2,300 potentially hazardous asteroids.
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