Asteroid 2026 JH2 — no need to worry about it hitting Earth
This big asteroid was discovered shortly before it was expected to hurtle past Earth. Any time you see a headline about asteroids approaching the planet
This big asteroid was discovered shortly before it was expected to hurtle past Earth. Any time you see a headline about asteroids approaching the planet, you can relax. Big and small asteroids fly by all the time. Picture the scene: An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth. It's the size of the Eiffel Tower, shaped like a peanut and potentially hazardous — sounds scary, right? Take asteroid 2026 JH2. It was first detected on May 10, 2026. And was due to fly by Earth eight days later — at a distance of less than a quarter of the distance between Earth and our moon. It's still very unlikely to hit Earth. But media coverage was everywhere. Such scare stories crop up all the time. In 2024, it was because of Asteroid 2024 ON — it didn't miss us, because it was never going to hit. "Publications need to have these 'cliffhangers' to have visits," said Juan Luis Cano of the European Space Agency's Planetary Defense Office. "But on a daily basis we are visited by many objects." In fact, around 100 tons of space material hits Earth every day. Fortunately, the mass is spread across many tiny rocks, rather than one, large destructor. Large destructors: near-Earth objects in a nutshell The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs defines near-Earth objects (NEOs) simply as any asteroid or comet which passes close to Earth's orbit. In more technical terms, NEOs are objects with a perihelion — their closest orbital distance to the sun — of under 195 million kilometers (121 million miles).
Given that Earth orbits the sun at a distance of about 150 million kilometers, NEOs are well within our solar neighborhood. Scientists like Cano know of about 34,000 NEOs, but none of the larger ones are currently on course to hit Earth. How likely is an asteroid impact on Earth? While tiny NEOs smack Earth every day, the larger ones hit far less often. Asteroids the size of 2024 ON might strike Earth once every 10,000 years. Those bigger than a kilometer in diameter, such as the Chicxulub asteroid that sent the dinosaurs into extinction 66 million years ago, might hit within the next 260 million years. "We estimate there are around one thousand objects larger than a kilometer and we have discovered 95% of them," said Cano. "These are the ones that could cause a global disaster." But smaller ones also have destructive potential. Depending on the speed and angle of entry into Earth's atmosphere, a 40-meter-wide (131-feet) rock could level an entire city. Hundreds of thousands of such smaller NEOs are yet to be catalogued. "We discover around 3,000 near-Earth asteroids [NEAs] every year," said Cano. "[But] we need [...] to find them quicker." Finding near-Earth objects is a 'tricky' business There is a handful of space-based telescopes tasked with finding NEOs. First, there was NEOWISE, which documented more than 158,000 NEOs. NEOWISE was launched in 2009 and retired in 2024 after a more than 10-year mission. Second, there's a successor mission called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor. And Canada's NEOSSat also tracks asteroids and comets, as well as space debris and exoplanets.
The BriefWire