Asteroid set to fly very close to Earth

An asteroid with the potential to ruin a city will pass Earth next week. 2026JH2, as it has been labelled by the astronomy community, is predicted to zoom by our planet at an estimated distance of 90,917 kilometres – only a quarter of the distance between us and the moon.

“In astronomical terms, it’s as close as you can get without hitting,” says Mark Norris at the University of Lancashire, UK.

Within the next year, there are only five known asteroids that will pass within the orbit of the moon, and only one other will come closer than 2026JH2.

2026JH2 – which was spotted only this week by observers at the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona and the Farpoint Observatory in Kansas – will pass closest to Earth at 9.38pm UTC on 18 May. Norris says it will only be visible from the northern hemisphere very briefly and that even astronomers in the southern hemisphere will find it challenging to view, because its 9.17-kilometres-per-second speed relative to Earth means it will track across the sky almost as fast as artificial satellites.

The asteroid is estimated to be between 16 and 36 metres in diameter, according to data published by the Sormano Astronomical Observatory. “It’s the kind of thing that would ruin a city quite efficiently, if it hit,” says Norris.

Astronomers are confident that almost every asteroid in our solar system that is larger than a kilometre across has been spotted and is being tracked, and as our capability to observe them improves, our database of these objects will be expanded to include increasingly smaller bodies. But asteroids the size of 2026JH2 are still largely unknown. Relatively small rocks like 2026JH2 are hard to see, says Mark Burchell at the University of Kent, UK. “They don’t reflect enough light.”

Richard Moissl, who leads the European Space Agency’s Planetary Defence Office, says that if 2026JH2 did strike Earth, it would cause an event comparable to the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013, which had around 30 times more kinetic energy than was released by the Hiroshima bomb in 1945.