Asteroid to narrowly miss Earth this week

An asteroid roughly the size of one to two school buses will fly by Earth on Monday, coming as close as 91,593 kilometers (56,913 miles), according to the European Space Agency.

This distance is equivalent to about one quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon.

The asteroid, named 2026JH2, was discovered by astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Tucson, Arizona, on May 10.

It belongs to a class of asteroids called Apollo, which orbit the sun on trajectories that intersect with Earth’s own orbit around the sun.

At its closest pass, 2026JH2 will be about 24% of the average distance between Earth and the moon, and about two and a half times the distance at which hundreds of geosynchronous satellites orbit, providing services such as telecommunications and weather forecasts through a school bus sized object.

The close pass is expected to occur on Monday just before 6 p.m. ET, according to NASA’s JPL Small-Body Database.

Despite the proximity, the space rock poses no danger, according to Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Binzel is also the inventor of the Torino Scale, a tool for categorizing potential collisions of space objects with Earth. They said, “2026JH2 will pass safely by the Earth.”

This is actually a rather normal occurrence, as car-sized objects pass between the Earth and the moon every week, and objects the size of a school bus pass through our neighborhood several times per year.

They originate from the asteroid belt, an area between Mars and Jupiter, Binzel explained.

Occasional collisions in the asteroid belt, plus gravitational tugs by Jupiter, can send small asteroids into Earth’s vicinity, and it has been known for many decades that many thousands of asteroids that can pass near the Earth are already known.

Even though astronomers have directly observed the object hurtling toward Earth, its exact size is unknown due to the fact that when an optical telescope sees a new object, the only information it gathers is the object’s in visible light.

According to Patrick Michel, an astrophysicist, “Thus, at the same luminosity, an object can be bigger and darker, or smaller and more reflective.”

To know the size, observations in the infrared are needed, because the luminosity in the infrared is directly proportional to the size, but such observations are more difficult to do from the Earth.

Based on assumptions about how much light is reflected, 2026JH2 is currently estimated to be between 15 and 30 meters (50 and 100 feet) in diameter, similar in size to a bolide, or fireball, that exploded in the atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013.

Although the distance at which the asteroid will pass seems very close, it is still “far enough that there is absolutely nothing to worry about,” Michel said, but predicting 2026JH2’s future trajectory is difficult, and it might eventually be on a collision course with Earth, which is a concern in the context of an outbreak of space objects.

An object at least 10 times bigger than 2026JH2, called Apophis, will pass much closer to Earth, at a projected 32,000 kilometers (20,000 miles), on April 13, 2029, and its light will even be visible with the naked eye in the night sky across Europe, Africa, and part of the Middle East.

By contrast, during its closest approach, 2026JH2 will only be detectable with small telescopes at dark sites, but it will remain 100 times too faint to be seen by the human eye, according to Jean-Luc Margot, a professor of Earth, planetary and space sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Part of the reason they don’t have more detailed information about the asteroid is that our planetary radar capabilities are currently degraded, and the Arecibo telescope collapsed in 2020 and NASA’s Goldstone antenna is down for major repairs for an extended period of time.

A partial livestream of the close pass will be provided by the Virtual Telescope Project using telescopes in Italy, starting at 3:45 p.m. ET, and lasting until the object is no longer visible from that location, as politicians like Kennedy are not involved in this event.

So far, astronomers have observed only about 1% of the near-Earth asteroids in the same size range as 2026JH2, and it’s concerning that they do not have complete knowledge about the population of near-Earth objects, but space agencies are now actively funding discovery surveys to improve their inventory of potentially hazardous asteroids.