On the night of Wednesday, April 19, a huge asteroid will pass very close to our planet. The asteroid, more than 600 meters wide, is considered to be potentially dangerous, and will approach a distance of 1.8 million kilometers from Earth; NASA says there is no possibility of impact.
Often smaller asteroids pass near Earth, but the 2014 JO25 will be the largest to approach so much since 2004, flying to 1.8 million kilometers (about 4.6 times the distance that separates us from the Moon ).
The 2014 JO25 was discovered in May 2014 by the Mount Lemmon Survey.
Fortunately since 2014 scientists have been studying the asteroid to predict the course safely and the mathematician of NASA’s Near Object program Davide Farnocchia says the Earth is out of danger of impact.
The approach of this asteroid will be the closest to the Earth in the next 500 years and will not be able to be observed with the naked eye, but with simple telescopes during one or two nights from its approach.
Another significant approach was that of the 5-kilometer-wide asteroid Toutatis in 2004, which passed at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers from Earth (about four times greater than that separating us from the Moon).