Asteroid bigger than the Leaning Tower of Pisa to pass Earth in days
If you’ve always wanted to see the Leaning Tower of Pisa, all you’ll need to do is look up next week.
An asteroid roughly the size of the famous Italian landmark is currently hurtling towards Earth at 46,908 miles per hour.
The space rock, 2025 OW, will drift past our planet next Monday at a distance of 393,000 miles – about 1.6 times the distance to the Moon.
Space officials estimate the rock is about 220 feet across, making it larger than the Leaning Tower of Pisa at 185 feet.
2025 OW is one of five ‘planet-sized’ asteroids getting up, close and personal with our planet over the next few days, Nasa says.
The space agency’s Asteroid Watch Dashboard says that 2025 OK1, which is estimated to be about 100 feet across, will fly past us today at a distance of 1,360,000 miles.
Another airplane-sized asteroid, 2025-OZ, is also doing a drive-by visit of our home today. As you read this, it’s about 3,340,000 miles away.
On Saturday, two more giant asteroids will pass by Earth on Saturday: the 110-foot-wide 2025 OX will be 2,810,000 miles above your head.
While 2025 OU1, about 140 feet across, will be slightly closer at 1,660,000 miles.
But none of these rocks are anything to lose sleep over, astrophysicist, science journalist Alfredo Carpineti told Metro.
‘There are over 13,000 near-Earth objects of comparative size that occasionally get near our planet,’ the senior writer for IFLScience said.
‘They could be dangerous if they hit Earth, but fortunately, these five will all fly well beyond the movement of the Moon.’
Asteroids are lumps of rock, dust and metal left behind from the formation of our star system 4.6billion years ago.
Most do laps around the Sun between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, some as small as rubble, and others hundreds of miles in diameter.
Earth will be slammed by an asteroid about 300 feet once a decade, while one 10 times the size impacts us every 700,000 years.
A space rock measuring just 160 feet in diameter can easily devastate the local area and pockmark the Earth, unleashing a force similar to a nuclear bomb – these happen once a millennium.
The so-called ‘city-killer’ asteroid, 2024 YR4, which officials briefly feared had a 3.1% chance of colliding with Earth, is suspected to be 300 feet across.
Our planetary defence options include intentionally smashing a satellite into it to nudge it off course or detonating a nuclear bomb near it.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre in Italy keep an eye on all these rocks whizzing about.
They calculate the odds of an asteroid impact as they plot out the possible orbits, which get more accurate as they observe them more.
This is exactly the case with 2025 OW, with scientists being able to predict its orbit for the next century.
As of July, Nasa has discovered more than 38,600 near-Earth asteroids, of which 872 are larger than a kilometre.
At least seven wandered close to Earth last month alone, with Nasa keeping an eye on 1,798 near-Earth objects on its ‘risk list’, though all have next to no chance of striking Earth.
‘Still,’ continued Carpineti, ‘it’s important we keep tracking them to know we will stay safe in the future.’
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