Bus-sized asteroid set to narrowly miss Earth in Monday flyby, watch live
A recently discovered asteroid is poised to pass by Earth on Monday at a distance of 56,913 miles, which may seem far but is actually quite close in the realm of space encounters. The asteroid, named 2026 JH2, was identified by astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona on May 10. Based on its brightness, the near-Earth object is estimated to be between 52 to 114 feet in size.
While this close flyby may seem alarming, experts assure that there is no cause for concern as the asteroid poses no danger to Earth. Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary sciences at MIT, stated that events like this are fairly common, with car-sized objects passing between Earth and the moon every week. Asteroids the size of school buses pass by multiple times a year, with many of them going unnoticed before advanced tracking surveys like the Mount Lemmon Survey were established.
The livestream of the close encounter will be available on the Virtual Telescope Project’s YouTube channel, offering a glimpse of the asteroid moving rapidly against the stars. The founder of the project, Gianluca Masi, mentioned that advanced telescopes will be able to track the asteroid precisely as it reaches its closest point to Earth, shining brightly at magnitude 11.5 before disappearing below the horizon.
In 2022, NASA conducted the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a $325 million project aimed at testing the spacecraft’s ability to divert an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. The mission involved crashing a 1,260-pound spacecraft into the moonlet asteroid Dimorphos, altering its revolution time around the larger asteroid Didymos by 32 minutes. This successful test demonstrated the potential to alter an asteroid’s natural path through high-velocity impact.
Out of over 730,000 known asteroids, approximately 16,000 are near-Earth objects, with 1,784 categorized as potentially hazardous. Despite these numbers, the chances of a large asteroid colliding with Earth are extremely rare, as noted in a 2024 report from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
In conclusion, while the close encounter of asteroid 2026 JH2 may grab headlines, experts reassure the public that there is no imminent threat. Ongoing efforts to track and monitor near-Earth asteroids, along with tests like DART, demonstrate our increasing ability to defend against potential impact events. As technology advances, so does our understanding and preparedness for any future encounters with asteroids.