Skyscraper-size asteroid will blaze past Earth in a close approach this Sunday

News
By published

Asteroid 2022 KY4 will, thankfully, miss our planet by a few million miles.

In this artist's illustration, an asteroid passes close to Earth.
In this artist's illustration, an asteroid passes close to Earth. (Image credit: Science Photo Library/Andrzej Wojcicki/Getty Images)

An asteroid the size of a 50-story skyscraper will zoom past Earth Sunday (July 17), making its closest approach to our planet in nearly 100 years.

The meaty space rock, dubbed 2022 KY4, will safely miss Earth by about 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers), or more than 16 times the average distance between Earth and the moon, according to NASA. This is considerably farther afield than the asteroid 2022 NF, which came within 56,000 miles (90,000 km) — or about 23% the average distance between Earth and the moon — on July 7.

NASA and other space agencies closely monitor thousands of near-Earth objects like this one. Even if an asteroid's trajectory puts it millions of miles from our planet, there is an extremely slim chance that the asteroid's orbit could shift slightly after interacting with the gravity of a larger object, such as a planet; even such a tiny shift could potentially put an asteroid on a collision course with Earth on a future flyby.

As such, space agencies take planetary defense very seriously. In November 2021, NASA launched an asteroid-deflecting spacecraft called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which will slam directly into the 525-foot-wide (160 m) asteroid Dimorphos in autumn 2022. The collision won't destroy the asteroid, but it may change the space rock's orbital path slightly, Live Science previously reported. The mission will help test the viability of asteroid deflection, should some future asteroid pose an imminent danger to our planet.

Originally published on Live Science.

TOPICS
Brandon Specktor
Brandon Specktor
Editor

Brandon is the space / physics editor at Live Science. With more than 20 years of editorial experience, his writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Reader's Digest, CBS.com, the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and other outlets. He holds a bachelor's degree in creative writing from the University of Arizona, with minors in journalism and media arts. His interests include black holes, asteroids and comets, and the search for extraterrestrial life.