Asteroid on Path to Blaze Past Earth

A “hazardous” asteroid said to be larger than a blue whale is set to pass Earth less than one-fifth the distance between our planet and the moon.

The asteroid, named 2018 CB, will pass by Earth on Friday at around 5:30 p.m. ET, missing the planet by just 39,000 miles, the Daily Mail reports. It is estimated to be between 50 and 130 feet wide, with an expert at NASA warning that an asteroid this size only gets this close to Earth “once or twice a year.”

The celestial object was only discovered by NASA on Sunday, Feb. 4, using the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) near Tucson, Arizona. Though the asteroid will just merely miss the planet, the space agency has assured people that it doesn’t pose any actual threat.

“Although 2018 CB is quite small, it might well be larger than the asteroid that entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, almost exactly five years ago, in 2013,” said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Asteroids of this size do not often approach this close to our planet – maybe only once or twice a year.”

Asteroid 2018 CB won’t be the first space rock to fly by Earth in the new year. In January, NASA announced that the 2002 AJ129 asteroid had officially been classified as “potentially hazardous.” Scientists claimed that it would pass by Earth at around 67,000 miles per hour — about 15 times faster than the fastest manned aircraft humanity has managed to build, the hypersonic North American X-15, which has reached speeds of 4,520 mph.

Currently, NASA has no means of preventing a cataclysm of this nature. There is a small craft, about the size of a refrigerator, which is being developed to deflect asteroids, but it’s not usable yet. NASA says that their first test of the technology is set for 2024.