Giant 'potentially hazardous' asteroid will fly safely by Earth in April

A large and  "potentially hazardous" asteroid is poised to fly by Earth next month, but don't worry — it poses no threat to Earth.

Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 will make a close approach to Earth on April 29. The hefty space rock has an estimated diameter of 1.1 to 2.5 miles (1.8 to 4.1 kilometers), or about the width of the isle of Manhattan. 

While an asteroid that size could wreak havoc if it crashed into Earth — prompting some alarmist and misinformed media reports — this asteroid poses no threat. 

Two images from the Virtual Telescope Project's "Elana" astrograph telescope show the potentially hazardous asteroid 1998 OR2 in the night sky on March 16, 2020, at approximately 4:45 p.m. EDT (2045 GMT). Each image is the average of 10 separate 180-second exposures. In the top image, the telescope tracked the asteroid's motion, so the asteroid appears as a white dot among a sea of small star trails. For the second image, the telescope remained fixed on the stars, so the asteroid has a small trail. (Image credit: Gianluca Masi/The Virtual Telescope Project)

Asteroid 1998 OR2, which orbits the sun in between the orbits of Earth and Mars, won't fly by Earth again until May 18, 2031, and it will be farther away, passing about 12 million miles (19 million km) from our planet, according to NASA. 

Its next two flybys, in 2048 and 2062, will be even farther away. The closest flyby of asteroid 1998 OR2 for the foreseeable future will be on April 16, 2079, when it will be only 1.1 million miles (1.8 million km) away.

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