A potentially hazardous asteroid that may be twice the size of the Empire State Building is set to zoom past Earth on Thursday.
The asteroid, named 418135 AG33, has an estimated diameter between 1,150 and 2,560 feet and will break into Earth's atmosphere at a rate of 23,300 mph. Thankfully, the asteroid is not expected to hit our planet.
The asteroid will come within about 2 million miles of Earth, which is eight times the average distance between Earth and the moon. This may sound like a big gap, but it is actually a stone thrown away.
We may know why the asteroid has a weird shape.
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NASA flags any space object that comes within 120 million miles of Earth as a "near-Earth object" and any fast- moving object within 4.5 million miles as a "potentially hazardous" object.
The first space rock was discovered in January of 2008. The Lemmon SkyCenter observatory in Arizona last flew past Earth on March 1, 2015, according to the Center for Near Earth Object Studies. The next close flyby of the asteroid is predicted to take place on May 25, 2029.
Thursday's asteroid might not be the biggest space rock to hit us in the next few weeks. When it passes us on May 9, 2022, the title will likely go to 467460 JF42, which has an estimated diameter between 1,247 and 2,822 feet and will be traveling at roughly 25,300 mph (40,700 km/h).
If an asteroid flies straight at Earth, space agencies around the world are working on ways to stop it. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission was launched by NASA in November of 2021. China is in the early stages of planning an asteroid-redirect mission. The country says it can divert the space rock from a potentially catastrophic impact with Earth by slamming 23 Long March 5 rockets into the asteroid Bennu.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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