NASA Asteroid Tracker: 177-Foot Asteroid Swings By Earth At 10pm Today

NASA has detected an asteroid that will approach Earth tonight. If the asteroid breaches Earth’s atmosphere, it will most likely explode mid-air instead of crashing to the ground.

The approaching asteroid has been identified by CNEOS as 2019 QX3. As indicated in the agency’s database, the asteroid is currently moving at a speed of almost 40,000 miles per hour. It has an estimated diameter of 177 feet, making it almost as big as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.

CNEOS predicted that the asteroid will enter Earth’s neighborhood on Sept. 3 at 10:10 pm EDT. During this time, it will only be about 0.02866 astronomical units or roughly 2.6 million miles from the planet’s center.

2019 QX3 has been classified by CNEOS as an Apollo asteroid. Like the other space rocks that belong to this family of asteroids, the wide orbit of 2019 QX3 takes it around the Sun and the Earth. From time to time, the asteroid’s orbit intersects with that of Earth as the planet goes around the Sun.

According to CNEOS, 2019 QX3 was first observed on Aug. 24. The agency currently does not have a record of the asteroid’s past and future near-Earth approaches.

At 117 feet, 2019 QX3 is certainly not big enough to successfully penetrate Earth’s atmosphere if it ends up on a collision path with the planet. Given its size, it will most likely detonate in the air instead of exploding on Earth’s surface and creating a crater.

However, this does not automatically mean that 2019 QX3 is not a dangerous asteroid. After all, it is almost three times bigger than the asteroid that exploded over a populated region in Russia in 2013.

This asteroid, which was only about 66 feet long, exploded at about 18.5 miles from the ground and produced energy that’s over 30 times more powerful than the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima, Japan in World War II.

Although much of the energy from the explosion was absorbed by the atmosphere, the catastrophic event still left around 1,500 people injured and damaged over 7,200 buildings in the area.