Asteroid 2013 NE19 will zoom past Earth today: Watch it live
An asteroid roughly the size of a football field will make its closest approach to Earth on Monday, and you can watch it zip through the sky, live, right here.
A live feed of asteroid 2013 NE19, provided by Slooh.com, will start at 6 p.m. PDT.
Asteroid quiz: Test your space rock knowledge
Asteroid 2013 NE19 was discovered less than a week ago by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Haleakala, Hawaii. Scientists estimate it is 200 to 400 feet long and is hurtling through space at the speed of 64,000 miles per hour.
That’s almost 18 miles per second!
The asteroid is large enough and going fast enough to cause major devastation if it hit a populated area of our planet, but that’s not going to happen any time soon. On this pass, Asteroid 2013 NE19 will stay a safe 2.6 million miles from the Earth — or 11 times farther away from us than the moon.
It will be too far away and moving too swiftly for most amateur astronomers to spot it on their own, so if you’d like to see it, tuning in to the Slooh feed above is probably your best bet.
Asteroid 2013 NE19 is still considered a near-Earth object (NEO) by NASA. The agency classifies any object that can come within 28 million miles of our planet as a NEO and worth keeping an eye on.
At the end of June, the space agency announced that a total of 10,000 near-Earth objects had been discovered, and asteroid hunters are currently finding new asteroids at the rate of about three a day, said Don Yeomans, who heads up NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Eventually, NASA would like to have a catalog of 100,000 near-Earth objects, NASA officials say.
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