Asteroid the Size of Mount Everest Expected to Pass Earth in April

An asteroid almost as big as Mount Everest is reportedly zooming toward Earth next month, but NASA says it is not expected to collide with our planet. It is called 52768 (1998 OR2) and was first seen 22 years ago. NASA said that early on the morning of April 29th (around 4:56 a.m. EST), it will pass within 3,908,791 miles of Earth, moving at 19,461 miles per hour.

“[The asteroid's discovery comes] on the heels of last month's installation of new state-of-the-art computing and data analysis hardware that speeds our search for near-Earth objects,” said NEAT Project Manager Steven Pravdo of JPL in a statement when the asteroid was discovered. “This shows that our efforts to find near-Earth objects are paying off.”

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The asteroid is reportedly between 1 and 2.5 miles wide and is classified as potentially hazardous, but NASA scientists have not put it on the agency's list of potential future impact events. “Our goal is to discover and track all the potentially dangerous asteroids and comets long before they are likely to approach Earth,” said NEAT Principal Investigator Eleanor Helin.

According to The Jerusalem Post, “NASA further states that there are no comets or asteroids in space that are currently a on [sic] collision course with Earth, and none are projected to hit our world any time for the several centuries according to their estimates.”

The same report added that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was 10 km. in diameter – two to five times longer than this one. “It is believed that the impact of that asteroid threw so much moisture and earth into the air that it began blocking out the sun, lowering temperatures to being unlivable conditions for the dinosaurs,” the report said.