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NASA is monitoring a bus-sized asteroid that is speeding towards our planet at more than 21,500 miles per hour, according to the the space agency's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).
Measuring around 40 feet in diameter, the space rock—known as “2026 EG1”—is expected to make its closest approach tomorrow, coming to within just 198,000 miles of us, closer than the moon.
(The average distance between our planet and the moon is about 239,000 miles, says NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory [JPL].)
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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 concentrated in the main asteroid belt, which lies around the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Some asteroids “follow paths that circulate into the inner solar system, including near-Earth asteroids, while others remain outside the orbit of Neptune,” NASA explains.
Near-Earth objects have orbits that bring them within 120 million miles of the sun and into the Earth’s “orbital neighborhood.”
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Earlier this year, in January, scientists discovered the fastest-spinning asteroid, which is over 0.3 miles in diameter and rotates about once every two minutes. Measuring around 2,300 feet across, this space rock, known “2025 MN45,” spans nearly the size of eight football fields.
The record-breaking space rock is one of 19 “super- and ultra-fast-rotating” asteroids found among around 1,900 asteroids that were discovered for the first time in June 2025.
Last year in February, NASA found that the impact probability of an asteroid called “2024 YR4” in 2032 was at 3.1 percent, which was “the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger,” the space agency noted at the time.
Further observations 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 says.
However, a small portion of them, known as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), do require closer attention. 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 are 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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