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NASA is monitoring three asteroids soaring past the Earth at about 8,000 to 15,000 miles per hour, the biggest of which measures around 1,300 feet in diameter.
The largest space rock, known as "424482 (2008 DG5)," is due to zip past our planet at over 13,800 miles per hour later today. It is expected to come as close as 2.17 million miles from the Earth, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL),
A smaller asteroid known as "2025 LD," which is around 73 feet in diameter, zoomed past the Earth earlier today at over 15,000 miles per hour, according to the JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The space rock came as close as 696,000 miles from the Earth.
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A third asteroid, known as "2025 KY4," measuring around 42 feet in diameter, also zipped past the Earth earlier today, reaching within 1.72 million miles of our planet. The asteroid soared past at over 8,000 miles per hour.
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Asteroids—small, rocky masses left over from the formation of the solar system nearly 4.6 billion years ago—are found in the main asteroid belt, orbiting around the sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter.
In February, data from the CNEOS showed the impact probability of an asteroid known as "2024 YR4" in 2032 was at 3.1 percent. This was "the highest impact probability NASA has ever recorded for an object of this size or larger," the national space agency noted at the time.
Further studies that month brought 2024 YR4's chance of Earth impact on December 22 in 2032 down to 0.004 percent. The data showed there is "no significant potential" for 2024 YR4 to "impact our planet for the next century" and "the range of possible locations the asteroid could be on Dec. 22, 2032, has moved farther away from the Earth," NASA said in a blog post on February 24.
2024 YR4 was measured to be about 200 feet across by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, Andy Rivkin, an astronomer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, noted in a NASA blog post on April 2.
There is still a "very small chance," however, for 2024 YR4 to impact the moon on that date, and that probability is currently 1.7 percent, the space agency noted.
The orbits of asteroids bring them within 120 million miles of the sun. Most near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids that range in size from about 10 feet to nearly 25 miles across.
"The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don't bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact," NASA says.
A small portion of NEOs—known as potentially hazardous asteroids—do merit closer attention. PHAs, which are around 460 feet in diameter, have orbits that bring them as close as 4.6 million miles of the Earth's orbit around the sun, NASA notes.
Despite the number of PHAs in our solar system, none is likely to hit our planet any time soon. "The 'potentially hazardous' designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of the CNEOS, previously told Newsweek.
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