meteor

When Santa Claus breaks out his sleigh on Christmas Eve night, he will need to make sure he doesn’t stray to far up into the Earth’s atmosphere. If he does, his reindeer might become spooked by the gigantic asteroid that will be whizzing by the Earth that night, at speeds in excess of 14,000 miles (23,000 kilometers) per hour. According to NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), this asteroid, which has been named 2024 NX1, will pass by the Earth at a distance of just 4,480,000 million miles, or 7.21 million kilometers. While this may sound like a lot, in astronomical terms this is the very definition of a close call, given the vast distances that normally separate everything