An enormous asteroid potentially larger than the Washington Monument is due to zip past our planet today.
The asteroid, named 2022 CE2, is estimated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to be about 370 feet across, with JPL’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) predicting that the asteroid could be anywhere between 295 and 656 feet in diameter.
For comparison, the Washington Monument is about 555 feet tall, the Golden Gate Bridge is about 745 feet tall, and an American football field is about 360 feet long.
The asteroid is expected to soar past us at a distance of 2,640,000 miles. While this may sound like an immense distance, it’s pretty close on a cosmic scale: the moon orbits us at 238,900 miles, and at its closest point, or nearest neighbor Venus is 24 million miles from Earth.
2022 CE2 will zoom by at a speed of 13.26 km/s, about 29,661 mph, nearly 40 times the speed of sound. Even the fastest bullets can only travel as fast as 1,800 mph.
Due to its proximity to Earth, 2022 CE2 is what is known as a Near-Earth Object or NEO, which are defined as objects that come within about 120 million miles of the sun, or 30 million miles of Earth.
“Asteroids and comets with a perihelion distance (closest to the sun) less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU), or approximately 120 million miles/194 million km, are called NEOs,” Svetla Ben-Itzhak, an assistant professor of space and international relations at Johns Hopkins University, previously told Newsweek.
Some NEOs that could potentially pose a threat to the Earth are additionally classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) or potentially hazardous objects (PHOs), defined as coming within around 4.6 million miles of the sun and having a diameter of at least 460 feet across. We have found 34,000 NEOs in our solar system so far, and about 2,300 PHAs are tracked by CNEOS.
“A potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is one that has an orbit intersecting the Earth’s orbit around the Sun by less than 0.05 astronomical units (1 AU is the distance to the Sun), that’s just over 4.5 million miles,” Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the U.K., previously told Newsweek.
“It also has to have an absolute brightness of 22.0 or less (lower values of the magnitude are brighter = larger objects), i.e. an asteroid (or comet) that would cause significant regional damage if it hit the Earth,” he said. “Not all NEOs are potentially hazardous, but all hazardous objects are NEOs.”
2022 CE2 is only considered an NEO, as it isn’t quite large enough be be classified as a PHA.
Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none of them are likely to hit our planet any time soon.
“The ‘potentially hazardous’ designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid’s orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact,” Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, previously told Newsweek.
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