Newly spotted asteroid slips by Earth and nearby satellites

A massive "potentially dangerous" asteroid spanning more than the length of the world's tallest building will fly by our planet on Feb. 4.

The roughly .7-mile long asteroid is considered longer than the Burj Khalifa, which at 5. 5 miles high current stands as the world's tallest building, and will fly at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour just Earth from 2.6 million miles.

"This is a fairly routine close approach of an object that we have known about many years," said Paul Chodas who is the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies. Asteroid 2002 AJ192 was discovered in 2002.

"We've been tracking it since then so we know its trajectory very accurately and predicted this close approach years ago," Chodas added. "Close approaches of near-earth objects happen almost daily, and many of them are closer than this."

Thanks to its reach and size, the asteroid is classified as "potentially dangerous" by NASA, but it's one of 1,000 asteroids and comets scientists currently know about that falls under this category.


Technically the asteroid's current size is unknown and it has been estimated based on typical reflectivity, said Chodas. That's the part of the reason why the asteroid's upcoming flyby is gaining attention

Under NASA's classifications, any asteroid or comet predicted to travel anywhere inside 0.05 Astronomical Units (or reaching under 5 million miles) of Earth's orbit and that has a size of at least 30 meters or more is deemed "potentially harmful."

"We know that this particular object is one of the ones that has no chance of hitting the Earth in the next 100 years; There are no asteroids that we know of any significant chance of hitting the Earth over the next 100 years, but you never know what we find out in our discoveries, "Chobas said.


Although 2002 AJ129 is far enough from Earth's orbit to avoid any collisions, scientists plan to continue to observe closely and the like of Puerto Rico in the Arecibo telescope in both the Goldstone Radio Telescope

They also have also been able to deflect asteroids from a distance. Last year scientists started working on the Double Asteroid Reflection Test (DART), which would allow them to strike the asteroid as its approaching Earth to shift its orbit through a technique known as Kinetic impactor. The first test with DART is planned for October 2022 and again in 2024.