The asteroid, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2019 BW1, is headed on a so-called “Earth Close Approach”. Asteroid BW1 will zip past the planet in the afternoon hours when it reaches its closest distance to Earth. NASA’s asteroid trackers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have narrowed this down to 4.22pm GMT (UTC) on Saturday, February 2. The news comes after the JPL first observed the asteroid on January 25, 2019.
Thankfully, the risk of Asteroid BW1 striking the Earth at more than 21,400mph is pretty slim.
Even at its closest, Asteroid BW1 will miss the Earth by more than three million miles (4.98 million km).
But the asteroid’s passage should be of interest to NASA’s astronomers, namely due to its size.
NASA’s JPL estimates BW1 measures somewhere in the range of 98.4ft to 219.8ft (30m to 67m) in diameter.
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An asteroid this big is eight-times longer than a London double-decker bus and is 30-times the length of a Queen Size bed.
At the same time, 16-and-a-half Volkswagen Beetle cars could fit inside of the asteroid one after another.
Towards the lower end of the estimate, Asteroid BW1 is still 15-times longer than a Queen Size Bed.
Much smaller asteroids have caused considerable damage in the past when they stuck the Earth.
The most notable example of this is the 2013 Chelyabinsk Meteor, which exploded over Chelyabinsk Oblast in Russia six years ago.
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The 65.6ft-wide (20m) space rock remained undetected as it hurled directly at Earth from the direction of the Sun.
The Chelyabinsk Meteor exploded in the air over Russia with 30-times the force of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.
More than 1,500 people were injured and more than 7,000 buildings were damaged by the resulting airblast.
NASA Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson: “The Chelyabinsk event drew widespread attention to what more needs to be done to detect even larger asteroids before they strike our planet.”
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Thankfully, Asteroid BW1 will not come close enough to hit the Earth but just close enough to be dubbed a “Near-Earth Object” (NEOs).
NEOs are comets and asteroids on orbital trajectories, which bring them incredibly close to the Earth.
NASA said: “As they orbit the Sun, Near-Earth Objects can occasionally approach close to Earth.
“Note that a ‘close’ passage astronomically can be very far away in human terms: millions or even tens of millions of kilometres.”
Tomorrow, Asteroid BW1 will approach the Earth from a distance of approximately 0.03332 astronomical units (au).
One astronomical unit measures roughly 93 million miles (149.6 million km) – the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
Asteroid BW1 will cut this down tomorrow to just 3.097 million miles (4.98 million km).
This is the equivalent of nearly 13-times the distance between the Earth and the Moon – 12.97 Lunar Distances (LD).