NASA is tracking the path of an asteroid that is set to shoot past Earth going 35,000 miles per hour, 10 times faster than a speeding bullet, on Tuesday.
Asteroid 2025 BS4 is predicted to come within 511,000 miles of our planet, which is still twice as far as the average 238,900-mile distance between Earth and the moon.
But due to its relative proximity to our planet, 2025 BS4 is still classified as a Near Earth Object (NEO).
NEOs are asteroids or comets that orbit the sun like the planets, but their orbits can bring them within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit, according to NASA JPL.
The asteroid is roughly 23 feet wide, slightly smaller than the average American school bus which ranges from 35 to 40 feet long.
And weighs as much as a blue whale -more than 970,000 pounds.
If this careening space rock were to hit Earth, the force of its impact would be equivalent to 19,000 tons of TNT — powerful enough to do catastrophic damage if it landed on a large city.
Asteroid 2025 BS4 is just one of more than 37,000 NEOs that NASA has discovered.
NASA is tracking an asteroid the size of a bus that will shoot past Earth going 35,000 miles per hour on Tuesday. That’s more than 10 times faster than a speeding bullet
The US agency and space organizations worldwide keep a close eye on these objects as they move through Earth’s gravitational neighborhood, making sure that none of them pose an imminent threat to our planet.
‘Asteroids can come at any moment towards Earth. Having eyes on the sky everywhere in the world allows us to track them,’ asteroid hunter Franck Marchis previously told DailyMail.com.
Marchis is a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and founder of the UNISTELLAR citizen astronomer network.
He and many other astronomers across the globe keep a particularly watchful eye on Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs), which are Near Earth Asteroids that are at least 460 feet in diameter and could come within 4.65 million miles of our planet.
If an asteroid that size were to impact Earth, it would cause widespread damage, countless injuries and even deaths, especially if it landed in a densely populated area.
But just because an asteroid is classified as a PHA does not mean that it will hit Earth. In fact, none of the PHAs in NASA’s database are a worrisome threat over the next hundred years, according to the agency.
Continuing to observe and track them, however, allows scientists to refine their orbits and make precise predictions about their future close approaches and impact probabilities.
The DART spacecraft launched from California in November 2021 and completed its 10-month journey when it intentionally collided the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022 (STOCK)
NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CENOS) leads this initiative. CENOS scientists use JPL’s ‘Sentry’ Earth impact monitoring system to continually analyze the most current asteroid data for possibilities of an impact within the next 100 years.
In the event that CENOS identified an asteroid on a collision course toward Earth, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordinate Office is developing strategies to save the planet.
‘The good news is that… we made an experiment showing that we can deflect an asteroid if we know well in advance that such an impact will happen,’ Marchis said.
‘And that’s changing a lot about how we think about this problem.’
That experiment was NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, also known as the DART mission.
The DART spacecraft launched from California in November 2021 and completed its 10-month journey when it intentionally collided the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022.
Dimorphos, around 560 feet in diameter, orbits a larger asteroid called Didymos, both of which are around 6.8 million miles away from our planet.
DART hit the space rock at more than 14,000 miles per hour and was destroyed upon impact, but the mission was a success.
Dimorphos received a small nudge that altered its trajectory by a fraction, achieving the mission objective.
The mission demonstrated that the kinetic impactor technique – which involves deliberately ramming a spacecraft into an asteroid – is an effective way to alter an asteroid’s trajectory.
In the event that a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) were headed towards Earth, NASA could one day use this technique to save us.
Although the initial results were highly promising, full confirmation of the mission’s success will come in 2026 when the European Space Agency’s Hera mission returns to Dimorphos to conduct a post-impact survey of the asteroid.
In the meantime though, plenty more NEOs will fly by Earth at perfectly safe distances, including a few more this week.
That includes another bus-sized asteroid called 2025 BF5 that will also make a close approach to Earth tomorrow, January 28, coming within 797,000 miles of our planet.
And on Wednesday, yet another bus-sized asteroid and a house sized asteroid will zip by Earth, coming within 1,630,000 miles and 2,330,000 of the planet, respectively.
