Asteroid Dubbed ‘City Killer’ to Make Closest Approach to Earth in Centuries on February 2nd

A “potentially hazardous” space rock the size of a football stadium is about to reach its closest point to our planet for more than 100 years, and it won’t get this close to us again for centuries more.

On Friday (Feb. 2), a football stadium-sized asteroid, deemed “potentially hazardous,” will safely zoom past Earth, marking its closest approach to our planet in over a century. This rare event will not occur again for several centuries. The colossal asteroid, named 2008 OS7, measures approximately 890 feet (271 meters) in diameter and will pass by Earth at a distance of about 1.77 million miles (2.85 million kilometers), which is more than seven times the distance between the Earth and the moon.

If you’re interested, you can observe the asteroid’s flyby through a live stream provided by The Virtual Telescope Project, starting at 1:00 p.m. ET on Feb. 2. As it traverses past Earth, the asteroid will be traveling at a velocity of approximately 41,000 mph (66,000 km/h), as reported by JPL. In terms of size, this space rock is roughly half the size of asteroid Bennu, which NASA recently explored and collected samples from, and at least 70 times smaller than the Vredefort meteor, the largest known space rock to have ever impacted Earth.

The asteroid, despite its size and proximity to Earth, is classified as potentially hazardous. However, it will never come close enough to impact our planet, as predicted by JPL. Although it is capable of wiping out a large city like New York if it were to crash into Earth, it is not considered a “planet killer” asteroid like the Vredefort meteor or the one that caused the extinction of dinosaurs millions of years ago.

NASA has identified approximately 25,000 potentially hazardous asteroids, but a significant number of them are smaller than the impending space rock. It is estimated that one of these dangerous asteroids will collide with Earth every 20,000 years.

The asteroid 2008 OS7 follows a highly elliptical orbit, resulting in significant variations in its distance from Earth during close approaches. For instance, when it was discovered in 2008, it was approximately 55.9 million miles (90 million km) away from us, which is more than 30 times farther than its current distance this week, according to JPL.

Although scientists have only directly observed the asteroid passing by Earth twice, JPL has simulated every close approach based on its orbital data since 1900 and predicted all future close approaches until 2198. The closest approach to our planet within this nearly 300-year dataset is expected to occur on Feb. 2 this year.

In recent weeks, several other asteroids have either made close approaches to Earth or directly impacted our planet. On Jan. 27, an asteroid the size of an airplane passed by at a distance of just 220,000 miles (354,000 km), slightly closer than the moon. Additionally, on Jan. 21, astronomers discovered a small asteroid only three hours before it exploded in the atmosphere above Germany.

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