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NASA is tracking an airplane-sized asteroid that's due to zip past Earth tomorrow at around 28,600 miles per hour, according to the space agency's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
The space rock—known as "2025 QD8"—is approximately 71 feet in diameter and is projected to get within 136,000 miles of our planet.
2025 QD8 is not the only asteroid within the vicinity of Earth this week. NASA is also tracking two house-sized asteroids—known as "2025 QH16" and "2025 RB," measuring around 43 feet and 53 feet in diameter, respectively—that soared past our planet today.
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Another house-sized space rock, spanning around 58 feet, is also speeding towards Earth tomorrow, according to NASA, joined by a 35-foot-diameter asteroid expected to get with 500,000 miles of our planet.
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Asteroids are small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. They are found concentrated in the main asteroid belt, which lies around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
So-called "near-Earth Objects" are those asteroids whose orbits bring them within 120 million miles of the sun—and into Earth's metaphorical backyard.
Earlier this year in February, data from CNEOS showed that the impact probability of the asteroid known as "2024 YR4" in 2032 was at 3.1 percent. This was "the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger," the national space agency said at the time.
Following further studies, NASA concluded in June that "the object poses no significant impact risk to Earth in 2032 and beyond."
Since then, researchers were able to further establish where the asteroid will be on December 22, 2032 by around 20 percent.
"As a result, the asteroid's probability of impacting the Moon has slightly increased from 3.8 percent to 4.3 percent," NASA said, noting that "in the small chance that the asteroid were to impact, it would not alter the Moon's orbit."
2024 YR4 is now "too far away to observe with either space or ground-based telescopes. NASA expects to make further observations when the asteroid's orbit around the Sun brings it back into the vicinity of Earth in 2028," the space agency said.
"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 notes.
But a small portion of them, known as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), do merit closer attention. Measuring more than around 460 feet in size, PHAs have orbits that bring them as close as within 4.6 million miles of the Earth's orbit around the sun.
Despite the number of PHAs out in our solar system, none are likely to hit Earth 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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