Watch Near-Earth Asteroid Make Close Pass Tonight

(Photo by NASA/SSPL/Getty Images)

An asteroid the size of three football fields (885 feet across) is set to make a close brush past Earth today, and you can watch the flyby via the Slooh Space Camera in a live webcast here at the Space.com website, starting at 9 p.m. EST. Although it’s being called a “hazardous near-earth asteroid,” Asteroid 2000 EM26 poses no threat of actually hitting the planet. According to Slooh’s technical and research director, Paul Cox, EM26 is whizzing through the solar system at a break-neck 27,000 mph; at its closest approach, the asteroid will fly about 8.8 lunar distances from Earth.

"We continue to discover these potentially hazardous asteroids - sometimes only days before they make their close approaches to Earth," Slooh's technical and research director, Paul Cox said in a statement.

Asteroid 2000 EM26's flyby comes almost exactly a year after two major near-Earth object events on February 15, 2013. That day (as recapped in this Head in the Clouds Amherst blog post), as scientists were tracking the extremely close pass of the 98-foot Asteroid 2012 DA14, another, unrelated space rock unexpectedly exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, causing substantial damage to buildings that injured more than 1,000 people with falling glass. The approximately 65-foot-meteor (20 m) exploded 18 miles (29 km) above the ground, and it released the energy equivalent of about 20 atomic bombs.

"On a practical level, a previously-unknown, undiscovered asteroid seems to hit our planet and cause damage or injury once a century or so, as we witnessed on June 20, 1908 and February 15, 2013," Slooh astronomer Bob Berman said in a statement. "Every few centuries, an even more massive asteroid strikes us - fortunately usually impacting in an ocean or wasteland such an Antarctica. But the ongoing threat, and the fact that biosphere-altering events remain a real if small annual possibility, suggests that discovering and tracking all near-Earth objects, as well as setting up contingency plans for deflecting them on short notice should the need arise, would be a wise use of resources."

Pieces of the Russian meteorite that fell in 2013 will be awarded to seven gold medal winners on Saturday at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Tonight's Slooh webcast will include commentary from Mark Boslough, an expert on planetary impacts. You can participate in the broadcast by using the hashtag #asteroid to ask questions during the 2000 EM26 show.

(Source for information: Space.com)