NASA is monitoring an asteroid that is hurtling toward Earth at about 22,000 miles per hour, according to the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
The space rock known as “2026 CC” measures around 100 feet in diameter. It is projected to make its closest approach tomorrow at around 379,000 miles from the Earth, just over the moon’s distance from our planet. The average distance between the Earth and the moon is about 239,000 miles, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Asteroids are small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Typically composed of rocky, dusty, and metallic materials, most asteroids are concentrated in the main asteroid belt, which lies around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. “But some follow paths that circulate into the inner solar system, including near-Earth asteroids, while others remain outside the orbit of Neptune,” the JPL notes.
These so-called “near-Earth objects” are asteroids whose orbits bring them within 120 million miles of the sun and into the Earth’s “orbital neighborhood.”
Last month, scientists discovered the fastest-spinning asteroid, which measures over 0.3 miles in diameter and rotates about once every two minutes. Known as “2025 MN45,” this asteroid spans nearly the size of eight football fields, measuring around 2,300 feet across.
The record-breaking space rock is one of 19 “super- and ultra-fast-rotating” asteroids found among around 1,900 asteroids that were detected for the first time last June.
In February 2025, data from the CNEOS indicated that the impact probability of an asteroid known as “2024 YR4” in 2032 was at 3.1 percent; it was “the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger,” the space agency noted at the time.
But subsequent studies found that “the object poses no significant impact risk to Earth in 2032 and beyond,” the agency concluded.
“The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don’t bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact,” NASA advises.
However, a small portion of them, known as potentially hazardous asteroids do merit closer monitoring. PHAs have orbits that bring them as close as within 4.6 million miles of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, notes NASA.
Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none is likely to hit our planet any time soon.
“The ‘potentially hazardous’ designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid’s orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact,” Paul Chodas, manager of the CNEOS, previously told Newsweek.
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