A bus-sized asteroid is passing earth today

You can watch asteroid 2022 NF as it passes Earth beginning around 4pm EDT Wednesday.

An artist’s conception of an asteroid passing close to Earth (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

A bus-sized asteroid will pass close to Earth on Wednesday afternoon, passing well within the Moon’s orbit, and you can watch.

Asteroid 2022 NF will make its closest approach of 55,300 miles to Earth on Thursday, 7 July, but the Virtual Telescope Project is offering a livestream tracking the asteroid’s path that launches at 4pm EDT Wednesday afternoon.

Discovered on 4 July by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-Starrs telescope at Haleakala Observatory in Hawaii, the 22-foot diameter asteroid 2022 NF will not threaten Earth. But Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, has yet to plot the asteroid’s path out beyond 2022 in the lab’s small body database — asteroid 2022 NF orbits the Sun once every 3.7 years or so.

It’s also not the only space rock to pass near Earth over the next six days, although it will pass the closest.

Asteroid 2022 NE, a similarly sized space rock to 2022 NF, will make its closest pass by Earth on Wednesday, coming within 85,000 miles, according to JPL’s near Earth asteroid website. The airliner sized asteroid 2019 NW5 will then pass around 3.5 million miles from Earth on 10 July, the house-sized asteroid 2022 NH will pass within 1 million miles of our planet on 11 July and another bus-sized asteroid, 2015 OQ21, will pass 4.3 million miles from Earth on 12 July.