NASA is closely monitoring a bus-sized asteroid that is set to pass near Earth this Saturday, at a distance only slightly farther than the moon. According to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), the asteroid, named 2024 VK3, measures between 28 and 62 feet wide and will travel at approximately 29,300 mph. This space rock will come within 273,000 miles of Earth, just beyond the moon’s average distance of 238,900 miles.
This close encounter is expected to occur in the early morning hours and poses no threat to our planet. 2024 VK3 is one of five asteroids that will pass by Earth this weekend. Among them, three are roughly the size of commercial airplanes, and one is about the size of a house. The next-closest flyby will be by the airplane-sized asteroid 2024 VZ2, which will come within 790,000 miles of Earth, while the others will remain over a million miles away, with the house-sized asteroid 2024 UC5 reaching its closest point at 2,580,000 miles.
All these asteroids are classified as Near Earth Objects (NEOs), being within approximately 30 million miles of Earth. NASA has identified and tracked around 36,000 NEOs, primarily to detect potential collision threats. Using ground-based and space-based telescopes, including the Near-Earth Object Surveyor, NASA tracks and characterizes these objects. The Near-Earth Object Surveyor is an infrared space telescope designed to discover and assess Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs).
PHAs are asteroids with a high likelihood of close approaches to Earth and are large enough to cause significant damage upon impact. They are defined as any space rock within 0.05 astronomical units (about 4,647,790 miles) of Earth’s orbit with an absolute brightness of 22.0 or less. Absolute brightness indirectly measures an asteroid’s size, with lower magnitudes indicating larger, brighter objects. None of the asteroids passing by this weekend are considered PHAs.
In preparation for potential future threats, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) is developing technologies to protect Earth from catastrophic asteroid impacts. Established in 2016, the PDCO focuses on finding, tracking, and understanding asteroids and comets that could pose impact hazards. One of its notable initiatives is the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), launched in 2021. This mission involved crashing a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, successfully altering its orbit to test the ‘kinetic impact’ deflection strategy.
In October, the European Space Agency launched the second phase of this mission, known as Hera. The spacecraft is en route to Dimorphos to conduct a detailed post-impact survey, aiming to refine and validate the kinetic impact technique as a reliable planetary defense method.