Two Killer Asteroids Are Flying by Earth, and You May Be Able to See One

This week, two asteroids — one big enough to destroy a city, and the other so large it could end civilization — are set to fly near our planet.

Don’t panic.

Both have a zero percent chance of impacting Earth. And, depending on where you are in the world, you may even be able to see one of them.

The bigger of the pair, (415029) 2011 UL21, will travel at a distance more than 17 times farther away than the moon on Thursday at 4:14 p.m. Eastern time. It is a whopping 7,600 feet long, but it will be too far to spot easily without a strong telescope.

However, two days later, the smaller space rock, named 2024 MK will get considerably nearer to humanity. On Saturday, at 9:46 a.m. Eastern time, it will zip by Earth at 75 percent of the distance to the moon. If you have a decent backyard telescope or perhaps even with some good binoculars, and your skies are cloud-free, you could see the 400- to 850-foot rock as a speck of light zipping across the starry night.

“The object will be moving fast, so you have to have some skills to spot it,” said Juan Luis Cano, a member of the Planetary Defense Office at the European Space Agency.

A visualization of the orbit of (415029) 2011 UL21, a near-Earth object that completes 11 revolutions around the sun in almost the exact same amount of time in which Earth completes 34 revolutions (i.e., 34 years), creating this pattern when plotting the asteroid’s location relative to Earth.Credit…European Space Agency