The swift asteroid, dubbed by NASA Asteroid 2019 CJ, is flying towards a so-called “Earth Close Approach”. The news comes exactly one month after NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) first spotted the space rock. NASA’s JPL now expects Asteroid CJ to swing by the Earth this afternoon, Monday, February 25. NASA asteroid trackers have narrowed the asteroid flyby to around 3.13pm GMT (UTC).
When the asteroid near-misses the Earth, the space rock will shoot past at breakneck speeds of around 10,760mph or 4.81km per second.
This means Asteroid CJ will fly by 14.02-times faster than the speed of sound.
And if that was not terrifying enough, NASA’s JPL estimates CJ measures in the range of 65.6ft to 147.6ft (20m to 45m) across.
Towards the lower end of that estimate, the asteroid resembles the devastating Chelyabinsk Meteor, which struck Russia six years ago.
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In 2013, a small space rock measuring only 65.6ft (20m) in diameter, entered the atmosphere undetected and from the direction of the Sun.
The asteroid exploded over Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast with 30-times the force of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, damaging more than 7,000 buildings and injuring more than 1,000 people with broken glass.
Unfortunately, asteroids of this size are some of the most commonly encountered space rocks zipping around the solar system.
NASA explained: “Asteroids, sometimes called minor planets, are rocky remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
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“Most of this ancient space rubble can be found orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter within the main asteroid belt.
“Asteroids range in size from Vesta – the largest at about 329 miles (530km) in diameter – to bodies that are less than 33ft (10m) across.
“The total mass of all the asteroids combined is less than that of Earth’s Moon.”
Thankfully, the risk of Asteroid CJ deviating enough from its trajectory to slam into Earth is pretty minimal.
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Even at its closest, the asteroid will miss our home planet by seven times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
NASA’s JPL estimates Asteroid CJ will approach the Earth today from a distance of 0.01900 astronomical units (au).
One astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun and measures around 93 million miles (150.6 million km).
Today, the NASA-tracked asteroid will considerably close this distance down to just 1.76 million miles (2.84 million km).
After the close flyby, NASA’s JPL calculates Asteroid CJ will approach Earth another 20 times between today and February 2133.