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Two asteroids, each about as big as a school bus, are zooming past Earth this Tuesday. They’re going super fast—over 25,000 miles per hour.
First up is asteroid 2025 BS4. It’s about 22 feet wide, maybe as big as 40 feet across. It’ll fly by Earth at around 511,000 miles away. Sounds far? Well, it’s close enough for NASA to keep an eye on it.
Just to give you an idea: Mars is 245.22 million miles from us, and the moon’s only 238,900 miles away. So yeah, 511,000 miles is pretty darn close in space terms.
The second one, called 2025 BF5, measures roughly 36 feet across and will whiz by at a mind-boggling speed of 35,800 miles per hour. That’s like 46 times faster than sound! Its closest approach will be about 797,000 miles away.
NASA has labeled both these asteroids as Apollo class Near-Earth Objects (NEO). Basically, NEOs are comets and asteroids that get pulled by nearby planets’ gravity into orbits that bring them closer to Earth.
Neither 2025 BS4 nor 2025 BF5 is expected to crash into our planet. Phew! They’re just two out of ten NEOs making a close pass between January 27 and February 1.
The biggest of them all? That would be DJ 155. It ranges from 138 to 305 feet in diameter and will swing by on January 31. Back in December, a similar-sized asteroid nearly brushed past us; scientists said if it hit, it could unleash energy equal to 12 million tonnes of TNT!
Luckily for us, DJ 155 will stay at a safe distance of about 4,420,000 miles away.
