Newfound asteroid the size of a house will fly safely by Earth Wednesday

A newly discovered asteroid about the size of a house will zip safely by Earth on Wednesday (April 15), passing just inside the orbit of the moon. 

The asteroid 2020 GH2 will pass Earth at a range of about 223,000 miles (359,000 kilometers). The average distance from the Earth to the moon is about 239,000 miles (385,000 km). 

Asteroid 2020 GH2 is about between 43 and 70 feet (13-70 meters) wide, or about the size of a detached house, according to data from the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the agency's Asteroid Watch Twitter account. It was first discovered on Saturday (April 11) and is being tracked by astronomers at several observatories, including the Catalina Sky Survey at Mount Lemmon in Arizona, according to the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Related: Potentially dangerous asteroids (images) 
More:
Near-Earth asteroids: Famous flybys & close calls (infographic)

This NASA graphic depicts the orbits of the Earth, the moon and the asteroid 2020 GH2 during its Earth flyby on April 15, 2020. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Asteroid 2020 GH2 poses no impact risk to Earth during its flyby. While flying inside the moon's orbit sounds like a close shave by an asteroid, there's actually a lot of room. 

In a March 31 video shared on Twitter by NASA's Asteroid Watch Twitter account, Kelly Fast of the agency's Planetary Defense Coordination Office demonstrated just how much space is out there. She used a tennis ball as the moon and a basketball as the Earth, placing them 25 feet (7 meters) apart in a hallway — the scale distance between the Earth and moon. At that scale, a huge asteroid like the one that doomed the dinosaurs would be the size of a grain of salt, Fast said.  

"Space is pretty big," Fast said in the video, which is part of the NASA At Home project. "A close-approach asteroid is really starting to get close, maybe, when it gets within the distance of the weather satellites." Geostationary weather satellites orbit the Earth at a distance of about 22,000 miles (35,000 km). 

That's not to say that near-Earth asteroids don't represent a potential threat to Earth. Scientists with NASA's Planetary Defense Program and around the world regularly observe the skies for new and known asteroids that might pose a danger to Earth. 

Any asteroid about 500 feet (140 m) or larger with an orbit that brings it within 4.7 million miles (7.5 million km) of Earth is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid, NASA officials have said. As of 2019, scientists have discovered about 19,000 near-Earth asteroids, with about 30 newfound asteroids added each week. 

And if you thought the house-sized asteroid 2020 GH2 sounds big, NASA is gearing up for an even larger asteroid to fly by on April 29. On that day, the potentially hazardous asteroid 1998 OR2 will fly by Earth at a safe distance of 3.9 million miles (6.2 million km). 

Correction: This story was updated on April 15 to reflect that NASA's Asteroid Watch is an outreach arm online on Twitter and this website and not a planetary defense program. The agency's Planetary Defense Program is overseen by the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

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Tariq Malik
Editor-in-Chief

Tariq is the Editor-in-Chief of Space.com and joined the team in 2001, first as an intern and staff writer, and later as an editor. He covers human spaceflight, exploration and space science, as well as skywatching and entertainment. He became Space.com's Managing Editor in 2009 and Editor-in-Chief in 2019. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering education and city beats in La Habra, Fullerton and Huntington Beach. In October 2022, Tariq received the Harry Kolcum Award for excellence in space reporting from the National Space Club Florida Committee. He is also an Eagle Scout (yes, he has the Space Exploration merit badge) and went to Space Camp four times as a kid and a fifth time as an adult. He has journalism degrees from the University of Southern California and New York University. You can find Tariq at Space.com and as the co-host to the This Week In Space podcast with space historian Rod Pyle on the TWiT network. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Twitter @tariqjmalik.

  • 1greenie1
    Where in relation to the moon/constellations would I expect to see the asteroid if I were to have a go of trying to find it?
    Reply
  • Hartful
    In what part of the world will it be visible?
    Will it be visible to the naked eye?
    Reply
  • rod
    The report states "A newly discovered asteroid about the size of a house will zip safely by Earth on Wednesday (April 15), passing just inside the orbit of the moon."

    Presently, many small objects pass by Earth and the Moon. 100th lunar asteroid collision confirmed by second telescope the Moon continues to be hit by small bodies, observed and documented now. My observation - the present lunar impact rate observed is very small compared to the lunar crater record documented. The lunar crater record indicates catastrophic bombardment in the past during the Moon's orbital history with Earth. The Giant Impact model for the origin of the Moon features the proto-Moon that is hot and molten after formation and continues to grow by accretion. Early impacts after the proto-Moon formation would be erased on the proto-Moon's surface as the Moon solidified and cooled - it would seem. The asteroid belt observed today, according to the standard accretion disk model for the solar system, we should see many more asteroids, some say orders of magnitude more mass should be there. Ref - Planet formation: key mechanisms and global models, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200205756R/abstract
    We live today in a basically quite period of solar system history vs. the catastrophism of the past :)
    Reply
  • AlbusRockets
    Tank said:
    This an object the size of a house thousands of miles away... Can you see a house on earth thousands of miles away? 🤦

    Hmm, this is an incredibly rude and dismissive response. Its logic also quite flawed.

    We cannot, for example, see a football field from 250 miles away while on Earth, however, the International Space Station can shine at times with a magnitude -3.9.

    Perhaps try being a little less unpleasant to someone showing genuine interest in an awe inspiring subject.

    Hartful said:
    In what part of the world will it be visible?
    Will it be visible to the naked eye?

    For this particular object, unfortunately, it appears as if it will remain out of the reach of naked eye viewing.

    https://theskylive.com/2020gh2-info
    Reply
  • Lutfij
    Civility is complusory here!
    Reply
  • Catastrophe
    "It was first discovered on Saturday (April 11)"
    What happened to all the years when we could have politely nudged it off course?

    Will someone please tell us what would have happened if it had been 'on course'?
    Reply