An asteroid the size of a commercial airplane will skim past our planet on Wednesday, September 3. Asteroid 2025 QD8 has no chance of hitting Earth, but its brief proximity will allow scientists (and you!) a rare opportunity to observe a passing asteroid at very close range.
The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0 will host a livestream of the flyby starting at 7:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, September 2. This astronomical program, overseen by the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Italy, uses remotely controlled telescopes to provide real-time observations of space.
2025 QD8’s rendezvous with Earth
According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 2025 QD8 will pass within roughly 136,000 miles (218,000 kilometers) of Earth at 10:57 a.m. ET on Wednesday. For context, that’s about 57% of the average distance between Earth and the Moon. This space rock is approximately 71 feet (22 meters) wide and will whiz by at 28,000 miles per hour (45,000 kilometers per hour) relative to our planet.
On Monday, project founder and director Gianluca Masi captured a 120-second exposure of 2025 QD8 using the 17-inch “Elana” telescope. At that time, the asteroid was approaching Earth from a distance of 1.2 million miles (1.9 million kilometers). From this great distance, it looks like a tiny pinprick hidden amid the brighter stars that pepper the telescope’s field of view.
2025 QD8 will make several more close approaches over the next century, according to the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Objects Coordination Center. Wednesday will be the closest in the asteroid’s recorded history and through the year 2121. After that, it won’t pass by us again until 2038.
Why study near-Earth asteroids?
This asteroid is one of nearly 40,000 near-Earth asteroids NASA has discovered and catalogued since 1980. These are asteroids with orbits that bring them within 120 million miles (195 million kilometers) of the Sun, which means they periodically pass through Earth’s orbital neighborhood, according to JPL. This work is crucial for planetary defense, allowing astronomers to identify and prepare for potential threats to Earth.
The Center for Near Earth Object Studies characterizes the orbits of these objects, predicts their close encounters with our planet, and makes comprehensive impact hazard assessments for the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at NASA Headquarters. Most near-Earth objects don’t come very close and therefore pose no risk of impact, but astronomers have deemed a couple thousand as being potentially hazardous (to be clear, there is currently no known asteroid that presents an impact risk to Earth within the next 100 years).
2025 QD8 is too small to fit into that category. Even if it wasn’t, it won’t come close enough to Earth to raise alarm within the next century. Still, monitoring benign near-Earth objects like this one offers opportunities to test our asteroid detection capabilities and study the physical properties of these early Solar System remnants, giving insight into how the Sun, planets, and other celestial bodies came to be.
English (US) ·