A potentially hazardous asteroid spanning the length of the Washington Monument will make a safe, close approach to Earth on Sept. 18 and you can watch the flyby live online courtesy of the Virtual Telescope Project.
2025 FA22’s next flyby of Earth will occur at 3:42 a.m. EDT (0742 GMT) on Sept. 18, when the asteroid will pass 523,206 miles (842018 kilometers) from our planet — the equivalent to around 2.2 lunar distances — posing zero risk to us, or the moon.
Stargazers can tune in to the Virtual Telescope Project’s YouTube stream beginning at 11 p.m. EDT on Sept. 17 (3:00 GMT Sept. 18) to see live views from the organization’s robotic telescopes located in Italy as the asteroid approaches its minimum distance to Earth.
The 427-951-foot-wide (130-290 meters-meter-wide (427-951 ft) asteroid 2025 FA22 was discovered in March earlier this year by the Pan-STARRS wide-field imaging facility. The wandering solar system body was later classified as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) owing to its size/brightness and orbit, which give it the potential to one day make a threateningly close approach to Earth.
“While, we repeat, this is a safe approach, it is still remarkable: a similar close encounter, involving an object of that size coming that close, happens one time every ten years on average, accordingly to JPL Center for NEO Studies,” wrote Virtual Telescope Institute founder Gianluca Masi in a blog post announcing the livestream.
Following the close pass, 2025 FA22 will continue its 668-day looping path through the inner solar system that takes it well beyond the orbit of Mars.
NASA estimates that an asteroid the size of 2025 FA22 strikes our planet just once every 20,000 years and creates an impact crater measuring up to 1.3 miles (2.1 km) in diameter.
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