NASA Alerts That’s not every day we get visitors from space, but today a car-sized asteroid is making a high-speed approach to Earth! Before we get all freaked out by catastrophic impacts, let’s actually break down what that really means and see how to react to it.
How Big Is It?
The asteroid is about 4 to 10 meters in diameter, or the size of a small car. That sounds big, but in the world of space rocks, it’s small. These size asteroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere fairly regularly, and they rarely do any harm. Most small asteroids burn up when they enter, providing a dramatic show beam or meteor shower to anyone who can see it.
Should We Be Worried?
NASA’s answer: not at all. It will take the asteroid so long to reach the surface that it’s expected to break up long before it gets there. Though something barreling toward Earth at high speed may sound scary, larger objects of this size typically present no danger. Instead, they become a light show—their own natural light show—like splinters in the atmosphere.
How NASA Tracks Asteroids
Asteroid like this one has NASA’s team of experts from the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) watching it all the time. They watch space objects on the ground (with telescopes) and in space (with satellites) and calculate to within a single digit what their paths will be. This asteroid is grabbing headlines right now, but NASA has already done the math and knows it’s not a threat — so good news.
A Cosmic Reminder
But it is a reminder of just how active and dynamic our solar system is. We get space rocks of all different sizes zooming through space all the time and sometimes we get to see which ones are a lot closer to us. This asteroid won’t make it to our planet, but it’s still interesting to imagine just how big space is, and the things in it go.
Asteroid Approaching Earth With that in mind, if you hear about today’s asteroid, you have nothing to worry about. The reminder of what is possible in space, even if it’s exciting, is not something you need to worry about. And who knows? And if you’re lucky, you might get to see the whole thing come into view high above you, light the sky as it gently burns up in black nothingness in the atmosphere.
Thanks to NASA’s vigilant watch over the earth, these are cosmic events we can indulge in safely and know that the good people of the planet we’re watching from are constantly keeping an eye on things.
