A car-sized asteroid will buzz Earth at a little over half the Earth-moon distance late tonight (March 24), just three days after its discovery by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California.<\/p>\n
The close encounter between Earth<\/a> and the asteroid<\/a> designated 2026 FM3 will occur at 10:07 p.m. EDT on March 24 (0207 GMT on March 25). The flyby will see the solar system<\/a> object pass 147,836 miles (237,918 kilometers) from our planet’s southern hemisphere \u2014 only 61.9% of the distance to the moon \u2014 while travelling at 11,461 miles per hour (18,444 kilometers per hour), according to NASA<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 2026 FM3, which has an estimated diameter of between 4-8 meters (13-26 feet), will shoot past the moon<\/a> a little over three hours later at a distance of 370,022 miles (595,492 km), posing zero risk to either body.<\/p>\n Article continues below <\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Early observations have revealed that the asteroid travels a near circular path around the sun that intersects Earth’s orbit twice over the course of its 354-day period. The asteroid’s closest known brush with our planet occurred in September 1965, when it missed Earth by just 30,559 miles (49,181 km) \u2014 a hair’s breadth in astronomical distances.<\/p>\n However, current observations show that 2026 FM3 will make no such close approaches to Earth over the next 100 years, and it is far too small to be considered a potentially hazardous asteroid by NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies<\/a> regardless.<\/p>\n The dense gaseous shell of Earth’s atmosphere forms a protective barrier against smaller asteroids, which can on occasion be seen forming brief, fiery trails in the sky in the form of meteors, or “shooting stars”<\/a>. Larger pieces of debris create dramatic fireballs, as was seen in recent events that occured over Ohio<\/a> and Texas<\/a>, which can fragment to scatter chunks of debris over the land below.<\/p>\n 2026 FM3 is just one of over 41,000 near-Earth asteroids discovered to date \u2014 a number that is likely to swell dramatically as powerful new observatories come online, such as the Vera Rubin Observatory<\/a>, which pinpointed the locations of 2,000 previously unknown asteroids<\/a> in its initial dataset.<\/p>\n Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect the reflect the correct percentage of the lunar distance that the asteroid will pass from Earth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A car-sized asteroid will buzz Earth at a little over half the Earth-moon distance late tonight (March 24),…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-562014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/562015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}