In early March, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies announced that they had detected two asteroids, the 1998 OH and the 1998 OR2, that they had been classified as ‘potentially dangerous objects‘ because “they are enough large enough to cause global effects if one of them hit Earth.” Both objects were discovered by the department responsible for searching for potentially dangerous asteroids for their possible impact on our planet.

However, the North American space agency has wanted to make it clear that, despite the size of both, there is no risk of collision. The reason is that they will pass about five million kilometres from our planet, that is, thirteen times the distance between Earth and the Moon. The asteroid that will fly over Earth on April 29 is 1.7 kilometres long and 4.1 kilometres wide.

No need to be alarmed

The first of those asteroids that will fly over Earth is 1998 OR2 and was discovered in 1998. In his case, it is expected to fly over Earth on Wednesday, April 29 when it is 08:56 GMT. It will pass at a speed of more than 31,000 kilometres per hour and will not approach less than 6 million kilometres from Earth.

The asteroid that will fly over Earth on April 29 is 1.7 kilometres long and 4.1 kilometres wide, but it is not the largest to visit us.

However, as NASA’s Sentry System discovered, the largest asteroid to have flown over Earth did so in 2017 and will not do so again until 2057. It is a potentially dangerous object due to its colossal size: measures two and a half kilometers wide by 9 kilometres long.

This system is responsible for “continuously scanning the most current asteroid catalog for possibilities of future impact with Earth in the next 100 years”. With the arrival of the asteroid, the executive director of the NASA Asteroid Institute, ex-astronaut Ed Lu, told CNN that “it is an exciting time for planetary defence: the new observations will allow us to track 10 times more asteroids than we’ve tracked before.”