A City-Killing Asteroid Will Narrowly Miss the Earth Today. We Discovered It Only a Week Ago.

"If a near-Earth object (NEO) big enough to wipe out humanity entirely is ever on a collision course with our planet, we're likely to find out about it a good while before it actually happens, maybe allowing us to do something about it before the object arrives. And here's the counterpoint likely to keep you up at night: For smaller objects, the kind that might only level a single city or wipe out a few million people here or there, it's entirely likely that we'd find out about it when it's far too late to do anything."

"Said asteroid, potentially the size of two school buses, is named 2026JH2 and was discovered all of eight days ago, on May 10, by astronomers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Tucson, Arizona. At around 6 p.m. EST today, 2026JH2 will make an extremely close pass of the Earth, at about 24% of the average distance between the Earth and the moon. It's a distance equal to only 2.5 times the average distance at which our own geosynchronous satellites tend to orbit the planet for purposes like telecommunications."

"In terms of size, 2026JH2-which originated in the Asteroid Belt of our own solar system-is estimated to be about 50 to 100 feet in diameter. That's plenty big enough to do some very serious damage, although this depends almost entirely on where and how that kind of object strikes the Earth. On the low end of the size estimate, we might be talking about an asteroid similar in impact to the Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded in an early morning airburst over Russia's Chelyabinsk Oblast on Feb. 15, 2013, captured on numerous dash cams and security footage."

A potentially hazardous near-Earth object named 2026JH2 was discovered eight days after detection by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Tucson, Arizona. It is expected to pass Earth at about 6 p.m. EST, reaching roughly 24% of the average Earth–Moon distance. The closest approach is about 56,913 miles, comparable to only a few times the typical orbital distance of geosynchronous satellites. The asteroid is estimated at 50 to 100 feet in diameter and originated in the asteroid belt. Its impact severity depends on where and how it strikes, with the smaller end comparable to the Chelyabinsk meteor airburst in 2013.

Read at Jezebel