NASA reports that a large asteroid, comparable in size to an aircraft, will come close to Earth today; Find out its speed, dimensions, and other details.

Today, February 15, NASA has monitored an asteroid’s trajectory as it approaches Earth at an extremely close distance. This asteroid was detected utilizing cutting-edge space telescopes and ground-based observatories, including the NEOWISE telescope, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), Pans-STARRS1, Catalina Sky Survey, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope, which cost $1 billion. For more information regarding this near encounter, please refer to the provided details.

Asteroid 2024 CE1: Details

NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) has named this asteroid Asteroid 2024 CE1. This space rock is orbiting the earth at a breathtaking speed of 32965 kilometers per hour, which is much faster than Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM)!

It is just one of three asteroids predicted to pass by the planet today. Other asteroids passing by Earth are asteroid 2024 CN3 and asteroid 2024 CN4. NASA expects asteroid 2024 CE1 to fly past Earth at a distance of about 4.2 million kilometers.

How big is it?

This asteroid is about 88 feet wide, making it almost the size of an airplane! However, it is not large enough to pose a danger to Earth and has not been called a potentially hazardous asteroid. Only celestial bodies longer than 492 feet that pass Earth closer than 7.5 million kilometers are defined as such.

Asteroid 2024 CE1 belongs to Apollo’s group of Near-Earth Asteroids, which are Earth-crossing space rocks with semimajor axes greater than the Earth’s axis. These asteroids are named after the huge 1862 Apollo asteroid discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth in the 1930s.

NASA has also revealed that asteroid 2024 CE1 has not passed by Earth before and this is its first close approach to the planet. After today, it is not expected to approach again in the near future.