An asteroid discovered in 2018 will fly very close to Earth on Nov. 2 according to The Center for Near Earth Objects Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Astronomers spotted the object from Palomar Observatory in San Diego County in 2018 followed by a 13 day observation arc and has not been detected since.
Asteroid 2018VP1 is currently projected to come close to Earth sometime during the day before the 2020 presidential election on Nov. 3, according to NASA.
The asteroid will likely come as close to between 4,700 miles and 260,000 miles of Earth, according to Forbes.
The good news is there is only a 1 in 240 (0.41%) chance of the asteroid entering earth’s atmosphere and because the asteroid is only around 7 feet in diameter, if it does manage to enter the Earth’s atmosphere, it would appear as an extremely bright meteor and break up into tiny pieces.
The logarithmic scale used by astronomers to rate the potential hazard of impact of an asteroid rates 2018VP1 a -3.57
Actual scale values less than -2 reflect events for which there are no likely consequences, while Palermo Scale values between -2 and 0 indicate situations that merit careful monitoring.
— NASA's JPL - Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale
For the past 290 million years, large asteroids have been crashing into Earth more than twice as often as they did in the previous 700 million years, according to a 2019 study in the journal Science.
Asteroids still only hit Earth on average every million or few million years, even with the increased crash rate. NASA’s list of potential big space rock crashes shows no pending major threats.
The biggest known risk is a 4,200-foot wide asteroid with a 99.988% chance that it will miss Earth when it flies very near here in 861 years.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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