A bus-size asteroid, first spotted just over a week ago, will zoom past Earth tomorrow (Sept. 3). The space rock will not get this close to us again until Sept. 4, 2125 — almost 100 years to the day.
The asteroid, dubbed 2025 QV5, was first spotted on Aug. 24. It is approximately 35 feet (11 meters) across, or around the same width as a school bus is long, and is hurtling toward us at more than 13,900 mph (22,400 km/h), according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Asteroid Watch.
The space rock will make a close approach to Earth on Wednesday, passing within 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers) of our planet — or around twice as far away from us as the moon, according to JPL’s Small-Body Database Lookup.
2025 QV5 has a roughly circular orbit around the sun, circling our home star every 359.4 days. During this time, it drifts between the orbits of Earth and Venus as it is subtly pulled from side to side between the two planets. As a result, it is unlikely to ever hit us. And even if it did, it is too small to be considered “potentially hazardous” and most of its material would likely burn up in the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, scientists are still keen to learn as much as they can about the space rock, and it has been listed as a target for NASA’s Goldstone radar telescope in Barstow, California — which specializes in tracking and imaging near-Earth asteroids — over the coming days.
Related: NASA’s most wanted: The 5 most dangerous asteroids to Earth
2025 QV5 will make several more “close approaches” to Earth over the next century, including flybys in 2026 and 2027. However, these flybys will occur at much greater distances from our planet. Next year, for example, the asteroid will only come within 3.3 million miles (5.3 million km) of us and will be three times further away again when it passes by in 2027.
The next time that the space rock will get anywhere near this close again is on Sept. 4, 2125 — approximately 100 years, 1 day and 2 hours after its current flyby — when it will reach a distance of around 830,000 miles (1.3 million km) from Earth, according to current calculations from the Small-Body Database Lookup.
However, the future date and distance of this cosmic coincidence are not fixed in place.
As researchers collect more data on the movements of 2025 QV5, they may refine a more accurate orbital trajectory for the object, which will change when it is likely to return. For example, the odds of the potential “city killer” asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth in 2032, which made headlines earlier this year, frequently changed before eventually dropping to zero as researchers collated more observations of the space rock.
Asteroids can also be knocked off course by gravitational interactions with other objects, such as planets and larger space rocks. If 2025 QV5 were to drift past an undiscovered asteroid between Earth and Venus over the next 100 years, we may not even know it has been redirected until it fails to show up on its expected trajectory in the future.
