In what is becoming a common occurrence, since we don’t have enough trouble treating ourselves on Earth, another giant object in space seems to be pointing at us. CTV news reports that NASA reports on a “massive asteroid” perhaps larger than two football fields are approaching our location and will pass through Earth tomorrow, Christmas Day. Known as asteroid 501647 and also designated “2014 SD224”, the asteroid will be closest to Earth around 15:20 ET. The good news is that the asteroid will not come into contact with Earth and the closest will be 1.8 million kilometers from the surface.
For those who track at home, this means the asteroid is a fraction the size of one seen in popular disaster movies. Take for example Deep Impact, which features a comet that is seven miles wide. The current asteroid is estimated to range from 92 to 210 meters (300 to 689 feet), making it approximately 2% the size of this famous space object. The asteroid as seen at Armageddon was even larger, measuring 600 miles in length and required the experience of Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck.
It should be noted that asteroid 501647, first detected in August 2014, is classified as a NEO (object near Earth) and NASA has even classified it as an object near Earth “potentially dangerous”. Apparently, NASA will be monitoring its course throughout the day. To be clear, “potentially dangerous” objects close to Earth are not designated as such because of the degree of proximity with which they can hit our planet, but because of their size. The site also reports that two other NEOs are destined to fly over Earth, but are much smaller than asteroid 501647 and “pose no threat to Earth.”
The news of this asteroid comes weeks after NASA revealed that “an object of unknown origin” would skate on Earth in the early morning of December 1. Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a theory about what the object was, but could not confirm it until it passed through. After clearing the sky, it was confirmed that this NEO was a 1960s centaur rocket. This was the second time a rocket stage from a previous launch had been trapped in Earth orbit since in 2002 a part of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket apparently also passed through our planet.
(Cover photo of CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT / PHOTO SCIENCE LIBRARY)