Asteroid To Pass Closer to Earth Than Distance to Moon Today

The Earth is due for an asteroid flyby today, as a chunk of space rock is forecast to soar past the planet at a closer distance than the moon.

The asteroid, named 2023 LZ, is predicted to pass the Earth at a distance of 0.00212 astronomical units or A.U.—one A.U. is the distance between the Earth and the sun, or around 93,000,000 miles.

This means the asteroid will fly past about 197,000 miles away. The moon, for comparison, is roughly 240,000 miles from the Earth.

Data from NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) shows that the asteroid is traveling at a speed of 13.63 km/s, or around 30,500 mph. A bullet travels at about 1,800 mph, about 17 times slower than 2023 LZ.

To date, NASA has discovered just over one million asteroids.

"Asteroids are 'bits of a planet that didn't happen' that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the Main Asteroid Belt," Jay Tate, director of the Spaceguard Center observatory in the U.K., previously told Newsweek. "However, as they are relatively small, asteroids can be disturbed quite easily, so they can develop orbits that cross those of planets."

Asteroids vary massively in size. Two of the largest, Ceres and Vesta, measure around 600 miles and 330 miles across, respectively.

2023 LZ, on the other hand, is much smaller, at only around 45 to 100 feet across.

The majority of the solar system's asteroids are located in the asteroid belt, and are occasionally flung out of this stable orbit by Jupiter's gravity. This is often the cause of asteroids travelling unusually close to the Earth.

"We believe they formed in the asteroid belt and got ejected by impact, or their orbits were destabilized due to the presence of Jupiter resonances in the belt," Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute, told Newsweek in October 2022.

Around 31,000 asteroids are classified as "near-Earth objects" (NEOs) because of their proximity to our planet, being less than 30 million miles away. This is quite a large-sweeping range, as Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor, approaches us at a distance of 38 million miles away at its closest point.

A further subset of asteroids are the "potentially hazardous objects" or "potentially hazardous asteroids," which are defined as asteroids closer than 4.6 million miles to Earth's orbit, and additionally being larger than 460 feet across.

"The potentially hazardous designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, told Newsweek last year.

2023 LZ is not large enough to fall into this category, but it is close enough to be an NEO. NASA's JPL Small-Body Database Lookup data shows that it will make its closest approach to Earth at around 6:36 p.m. UTC on June 14, or around 2:36 p.m ET, and will pass the Moon at a similar distance at 4:31 p.m. ET.

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