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Heads up, everybody. A couple of asteroids approximately the size of a school bus are set to make close approach with Earth on Tuesday at speeds of more than 25,000 miles per hour.
The first asteroid, named 2025 BS4, is around 22 feet in diameter and between 17 and 40 feet across, will come the closest to Earth. BS4 will buzz the planet at a distance of approximately 511,000 miles. While that may not sound close, it is close enough to be on NASA’s radar and list of upcoming asteroid close approaches.
Putting into perspective, Mars is 245.22 million miles from Earth and the distance from Earth to the moon is 238,900 miles. So 511,000 miles is pretty close when it comes to space.
The second asteroid, named 2025 BF5, is around 36 feet in diameter and will be zipping by Earth at around 35,800 miles per hour. That’s almost 46 times the speed of sound. It will be passing by Earth at a distance of about 797,000 miles.
Both asteroids have been designated Apollo class Near-Earth Objects (NEO) by NASA. The space organization classifies a space rock as a Near-Earth Object as “comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.” More specifically, NEOs are space rocks that come within approximately 120 million miles of the sun or within 30 million miles of Earth.
Neither asteroid 2025 BS4, nor asteroid 2025 BF5, is expected to make contact with Earth. However, they are just two of 10 NEO asteroids that NASA has determined will make close approaches to the Earth between Monday, Jan. 27 and Wednesday, Feb. 1.
The largest asteroid of that group is named DJ 155. It is between 138 feet and 305 feet in diameter and will pass by Earth on Jan. 31. In December, an asteroid with a diameter of 95 to 230 feet skimmed Earth and back then Daily Mail reported that “scientists estimate that it would impact with a force equivalent to 12 million tonnes of TNT and flatten an area of 700 square miles.” Thankfully, asteroid DJ 155 will only pass by Earth at a distance of around 4,420,000 miles.