A car-sized asteroid will buzz Earth at a little over half the Earth-moon distance late tonight (March 24), just three days after its discovery by the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California.
The close encounter between Earth and the asteroid designated 2026 FM3 will occur at 10:07 p.m. EDT on March 24 (0207 GMT on March 25). The flyby will see the solar system object pass 147,836 miles (237,918 kilometers) from our planet’s southern hemisphere — only 61.9% of the distance to the moon — while travelling at 11,461 miles per hour (18,444 kilometers per hour), according to NASA.
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Early observations have revealed that the asteroid travels a near circular path around the sun that intersects Earth’s orbit twice over the course of its 354-day period. The asteroid’s closest known brush with our planet occurred in September 1965, when it missed Earth by just 30,559 miles (49,181 km) — a hair’s breadth in astronomical distances.
However, current observations show that 2026 FM3 will make no such close approaches to Earth over the next 100 years, and it is far too small to be considered a potentially hazardous asteroid by NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies regardless.
The dense gaseous shell of Earth’s atmosphere forms a protective barrier against smaller asteroids, which can on occasion be seen forming brief, fiery trails in the sky in the form of meteors, or “shooting stars”. Larger pieces of debris create dramatic fireballs, as was seen in recent events that occured over Ohio and Texas, which can fragment to scatter chunks of debris over the land below.
2026 FM3 is just one of over 41,000 near-Earth asteroids discovered to date — a number that is likely to swell dramatically as powerful new observatories come online, such as the Vera Rubin Observatory, which pinpointed the locations of 2,000 previously unknown asteroids in its initial dataset.
Editor’s note: This article was updated to reflect the reflect the correct percentage of the lunar distance that the asteroid will pass from Earth.