A recently discovered asteroid called 2024 BJ is making a fairly close flyby of Earth this Saturday.
Spotted on January 17th, the up to 37 meter wide space rock will zoom nearer than the moon in the morning before whizzing past our planet around lunchtime. It’ll pass roughly 354,000 km away – over 90% of the lunar distance – while hauling at nearly 23,000 km/h.
Img Credit: – NASA Science
You can see 2024 BJ yourself around 5:30pm UTC by virtually peering through telescopes livestreaming the speedy celestial visitor. It’ll look like a quickly shifting white speck amongst the stars.
BJ follows an elliptical path crossing Earth’s orbit at the closest point to the sun before heading back out towards the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Over 1600 such potentially hazardous, Earth-crossing space rocks are known.
But at just 37 meters wide, BJ poses no threat. Earth seems safe from dinosaur-extincting, over 1 km wide “planet killers” for the next 1000 years at least.
And if a dangerous asteroid did sneak up on us, experts have some wild ideas to defend Earth, like trying to gently nudge it off course with rockets or possibly nuclear blasts. But with any luck, we’ll never need to play celestial billiards for real!
I aimed for more lighthearted, engaging language that sounds like one human chatting to another about cool space stuff.
