Stadium-sized asteroid flies past Earth on Tuesday – what do you need to know?

Asteroid 2006 WB will fly past Earth on Tuesday, and astronomers say it is one of nearly 40,000 near-Earth objects (NEO), which isn’t even the most exciting.

Nick Moskovitz, an astronomer and asteroid expert at Lowell Observatory, said we know little about this asteroid passing so close to Thanksgiving. This is because new NEOs are being discovered frequently as technology has improved, not because the threat to Earth is growing.

“The frequency of these things is so great that I just can’t keep up. And it’s a testament to the power of telescope surveys that scan the night sky every evening looking for new objects, and they’re getting really good at that,” he said.

The European Space Agency’s Near Earth Object Coordination Center recently highlighted notable NEOs flying astronomically close to Earth this fall, including 2006 WB.

There are almost 40,000 NEOs and more than 2,300 were discovered in 2024 alone.

2006 WB is estimated to be about 100 meters (380 feet) in diameter and is expected to reach just over twice the distance from Earth to the Moon on November 26. Another asteroid, 2010 WS, came closer to Earth last week, and their size estimates overlap.

“Due to the uncertainty associated with the size of these objects, none of these objects have been well studied.” We don’t know much about them. We have large error bars associated with their actual size,” Moskovitz said.

The 2006 World Cup asteroid is considered a stadium-sized object, but even that is an estimate. According to NASA’s NEO database, it could be larger, over 500 feet or smaller.

Large NEOs fly past Earth all the time, which sounds like bad news, but it’s okay. No, really, that’s it.

“A lot of these encounters don’t become known until they actually happen, right? This is because the objects are discovered when they are easiest to see, and they are easiest to see when they are closest to us,” he said.

As technology has improved, so has the ability to detect and track NEOs entering Earth’s neighborhood. ESA said October was a record month for NEO discoveries, with more than 450 new objects identified, the most in a month this year.

Recently, small asteroids were discovered just hours before they hit Earth. This is particularly exciting because while these asteroids are decaying above Earth, scientists are tracking them back to Earth. Moskovitz said this is sort of a natural version of a sample return mission.

“You don’t have to send a $1 billion spacecraft to retrieve samples from the surface and bring them home. But if you instead observe and have the right tools in place to observe these events, you can see that these impacts occur with some frequency,” he said.

Another sigh of relief for Earthlings is that close approach tracking will only improve with technology.

““We’re really in such an interesting sea change in astronomy, where our ability to collect data is exceeding our ability to analyze it,” Moskovitz said. “We can collect more gigabytes of data than we know what to do with.”

Moskovitz said an asteroid discovery could have additional lead time when the 8-meter telescope at the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile comes online. The US National Science Foundation and the observatory, funded by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, are expected to begin operations next year.

The Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, is also working to bring the study of astronomy back to the public.

The observatory’s Marley Foundation Astronomy Discovery Center opened in November. It is the first arts and science center of its kind open to all ages.

“The really special thing we bring is that we are an active research institute with a dozen astronomers currently conducting research, and we try to convey that to the public that comes in the door to share with them what.” “The state of the art in astronomy is,” Moskovitz said.