A newly-discovered asteroid will fly by Earth this weekend

A building-sized asteroid will pass roughly halfway between Earth and the Moon on Saturday at around 17,000 miles an hour.

Named 2023 DZ2, the asteroid was detected on February 27 by astronomers at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands.

Travelling at a distance of around 100,000 miles above the planet and approximately 95 metres long, 2023 DZ2 poses no risk to life on Earth, but will offer amateur astronomers the chance to catch a glimpse of this once-in-a-decade phenomena.

Writing on its Asteroid Watch Twitter account, Nasa wrote: ‘While close approaches are a regular occurrence, one by an asteroid of this size (140-310ft) happens only about once per decade, providing a unique opportunity for science.

‘Astronomers with the International Asteroid Warning Network are using this close approach to learn as much as possible about 2023 DZ2 in a short time period – good practice for #PlanetaryDefense in the future if a potential asteroid threat were ever discovered.’

Last September, Nasa successfully crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in an attempt to change its trajectory as part of the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) planetary defence mission. The resulting impact reduced the time it took Dimorphos to orbit around its parent asteroid Didymos by 32 minutes.

Earlier this week Nasa released images from the collision.

News of the latest close encounter comes as Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center chief scientist James Garvin warned that Earth may be at greater risk of an extinction-level asteroid collision than previously thought.

Using new high-resolution imagery, his team discovered four impact craters created in the past one million years, all associated with strikes thought to be ten times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb in history. Previously it was thought such strikes only occurred every 600,000 to 700,000 years.

However, with 2023 DZ2 posing no threat to humans except a potential late night stargazing, the asteroid is one to enjoy.

It is the latest night time spectacle in a spring that has been one to remember for stargazers following February’s dazzling display of the Northern Lights, the gorgeous green comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) sweeping by around Valentine’s Day and the Venus-Jupiter conjunction earlier this month.

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