Topline A building-sized asteroid will coincidentally fly by Earth during September’s supermoon and partial lunar eclipse early Wednesday morning, offering a celestial show full of events, and NASA is monitoring the space rock because of its size and how close to the planet it’s coming, though it’s not likely to pose any threat. Key Facts When Will The Asteroid Fly By Earth? Asteroid 2013 FW13 is expected to pass by Earth at 2:30 a.m.
EDT Wednesday, according to estimates by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. How Can I See The Asteroid? Because of the distance, the asteroid may not be visible to the naked eye. However, NASA offers a virtual asteroid tracker to watch where in the solar system asteroids are in real time.
Big Number More than 1.3 million. That’s how many asteroids NASA estimates are in the solar system.
Key Background Asteroids are rocky objects that orbit the sun like planets, though they’re much smaller, according to NASA. They’re made up of the leftover remnants from when the solar system formed around 4.6 billion years ago.
Asteroid 2011 AM24 is one of 18,232 Apollo-classed asteroids, which are asteroids that can cross into Earth’s orbit. NASA has taken the threat of an asteroid coming into contact with Earth more seriously in recent years. In 2022, it carried out its first Double Asteroid Deflection Test , which changed an asteroid’s orbit.
NASA launched a spacecraft into space and hit the asteroid, shortening its orbit by 32 minutes. NASA .