An airplane-sized asteroid is set to pass between the Earth and the Moon on Saturday afternoon at about 3:51 p.m. EST.
An enormous asteroid will pass between the orbits of the Earth and the Moon and will be visible through binoculars or a small telescope.
The asteroid, named 2023 DZ2, is large enough — it's estimated to be between 140 feet and 310 feet long — to take out an entire city and has been dubbed the "city killer." Fortunately, it is moving at a safe distance from the Earth.
NASA's Asteroid Watch says this kind of occurrence of an object this size and this close to Earth "happens only about once per decade."
Astronomers have established the International Asteroid Warning Network to coordinate worldwide responses to the threat of a potential "near-Earth" object.
NASA defines Near-Earth Objects as “comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth’s neighborhood.”
NASA classifies this asteroid as a "Potentially Hazardous Asteroid" due to its proximity to the Earth.
Last week, NASA scientists revealed that the Earth could be at a higher risk of a mass-extinction asteroid impact than previously believed.
James Garvin, the Goddard Space Flight Center Chief Scientist, shared his team's findings that analyzed data from several Earth-observing satellites examining four asteroid-impacted craters.
They discovered that the Earth has been hit by more asteroids than previous scientists had found. The explosion of these asteroid impacts is believed to have been 10 times more powerful than the largest nuclear bomb in history, hence multiple mass extinctions on Earth.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has been pioneering man's effort to build a colony on Mars, has frequently warned that in order for humanity to survive mass extinction, they must become a "multi-planetary species."
“The future of humanity is fundamentally going to bifurcate along one of two directions: Either we’re going to become a multiplanet species and a spacefaring civilization, or we’re going be stuck on one planet until some eventual extinction event,” Musk said.
Last August, the billionaire shared an article about the extinction of the dinosaurs after an asteroid hit present-day Mexico.
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“This will happen again – just a matter of time,” Musk tweeted.
NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) confirmed in 2022 that their mission to have a spacecraft use kinetic impact to alter the orbit of the asteroid, Dimorphos, was successful. This achievement marked humanity’s first time purposely changing the motion of an asteroid through deflection technology.