The fast-moving space rock, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2019 HS2, will zip past the Earth on an “Earth Close Approach” trajectory. NASA’s dedicated asteroid trackers at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) predict a Sunday, April 28 flyby. The asteroid will then come closest to Earth at approximately 3.30am UK time or 10pm Eastern on Saturday. Thankfully when this happens, the asteroid will not come close enough to strike the planet with brute force.
But the space rock will come close enough to our planet for NASA and other space agencies to keep a watchful eye on its trajectory.
Asteroid HS2 is a so-called “Near-Earth Object” or NEO, meaning it orbits the Sun from a distance of less than 120.8 million miles (194.5 million km).
Occasionally, these imposing asteroids and comets crisscross the Earth’s orbit and come dangerously close to striking.
NASA explained: “As they orbit the Sun, Near-Earth Objects can occasionally approach close to Earth.
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“Note that a ‘close’ passage astronomically can be very far away in human terms: millions or even tens of millions of kilometres.”
And according to the European Space Agency, NEOs are further classified as Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Near-Earth Comets (NECs).
Tomorrow morning, Asteroid HS2 will approach the Earth from a rough distance of 0.01310 astronomical units (au).
Just one astronomical unit measures the distance between the Earth and the Sun or about 93 million miles (149.6 million km).
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This means NASA expects Asteroid HS2 to cut this distance down to just 1.2 million miles (1.96 million km).
In other words, this is the equivalent of about 5.1 times the distance from Earth to the Moon – a unit known as Lunar Distance (LD).
Asteroid HS2 is an Aten-type object, which means it has an orbit similar to Asteroid 2062 Aten.
The object is also estimated to measure somewhere in the range of 42.6ft to 98.4ft (13m to 30m) in diameter.
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An asteroid at the upper end of that estimate is comparable in size to about three London double-decker buses in a row or 15 times the length of a Queen Size bed.
NASA said: “Up to a diameter of about 10m – 33ft – most stony meteoroids are destroyed in the atmosphere in thermal explosions.
“Obviously some fragments do reach the ground, because we have stony meteorites in our museums.
“Such falls are known to cause property damage from time to time.”
