Massive Asteroid to Fly Between Earth and Moon This Saturday
The asteroid, named 2024 MK, will come within roughly 290,000 km of our planet at its closest approach. While many small asteroids orbit near Earth, this one is quite large, measuring between 120 meters and 260 meters in diameter.
There is another intriguing—and somewhat unsettling—aspect of this asteroid. According to Alan Fitzsimmons, a planetary scientist at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland, 2024 MK will be visible from the southern hemisphere at its nearest point. The following night, it will appear in the constellation Scorpius, which is low in the southern sky in Canada.
However, don’t expect to see it with the naked eye. Fitzsimmons noted that even with a telescope, “you’ve got to know exactly where to look. It’s moving fast.”
Asteroid Day, sanctioned by the United Nations, was founded in 2014 by astrophysicist and former Queen musician Brian May, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and a few others. The goal is to educate the public about asteroids and their potential threats while urging governments to develop asteroid detection programs.
The threat of asteroids or comets impacting Earth is a genuine concern, though there are multiple sky surveys aimed at identifying potentially hazardous asteroids (PHA). One such survey, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), discovered 2024 MK last week.
Both Brown and Fitzsimmons note that there is always a 10-meter asteroid somewhere between Earth and the moon. Essentially, Earth is constantly plowing through debris. Meteors burn up in our atmosphere all the time, most of them small and unnoticed. Brown added that even larger impacts may go unnoticed if they occur over the ocean.
