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 in space.
If It Did Hit the Earth, the Destruction Would Be Unimaginable
The Christmas Eve asteroid is quite large as space rocks go, measuring somewhere between 95 and 230 feet (29 and 70 meters) in diameter. Thankfully, NASA says there is no chance this large space object will actually slam into our planet, even if it diverges somewhat from its expected path. Nor is there a risk of it hitting the Moon and knocking it out of its orbit like a billiard ball.
“It will be very far away, around 18 times further away from the Earth than the Moon is, and so with this predicted path won’t come close enough to hit the Earth,” Jess Lee, an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, confirmed in an interview with the Daily Mail Online.
If this object were to hit our planet, however, the damage it would cause would be incalculable. The asteroid is currently zipping along at an earth-shattering (figuratively and literally) speed of 14,743 miles (23,126 kilometers) per hour, and should it make contact with any other object it would deliver a forceful blow with the destructive power of 13 million tons of TNT.
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To put this in perspective, the nuclear bombs that leveled the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 produced an impact equivalent to between 16,000 and 22,000 tons of TNT. This means it would take around 600 such bombs to equal the effect of a heads-on collision with 2024 NX1.
An artist’s rendition of the asteroid WF9 as it hurtled across the solar system toward the Sun (and the Earth) in 2016. (NASA/Public Domain).
An asteroid that size hitting land would leave a path of devastation likely to extend for hundreds of miles in every direction. If it were to land in the water, which would be the most likely result, it would cause tidal waves that would render thousands of miles of coastlines around the world inhabitable for years.
“If you’d like to compare it to a previous asteroid impact, the Tunguska Event in Russia in 1908 involved an asteroid which was a roughly similar size to this one,” Ms. Lee noted.
In this mysterious event, which took place on June 30, 1908, an asteroid exploded in the Earth’s atmosphere approximately six miles above the ground, over a remote area of Siberia. There were few casualties associated with this event, but the force of the explosion knocked down 80 million trees and left an area of utter devastation that covered 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers). The ruin it caused would have been much greater if this object had actually hit the ground instead of exploding, but even as it was the death toll from the explosion would have been overwhelming if it had happened above a major city.
In 2023, a meteor under 60 feet (20 meters) in diameter exploded 28 miles (45 kilometers) above the Russian region of Chelyabinsk. This was nearly five times the altitude of the Tunguska explosion, and involved an object that was much smaller. Yet the blast this caused was powerful enough to damage thousands of buildings and cause injuries to 1,600 people. This highlights the incredible power locked up in high-speed objects traveling through space, which do represent a real danger to our fragile Earth.
Counting Our Blessings This Holiday Season
One interesting fact about this asteroid is that it wasn’t detected until December 12. So if calculations of its pathway had revealed a possible or likely collision with Earth, there would have been precious little time to organize a global inland evacuation plan (getting as far away as possible from coastlines would have given people the best chance to survive the cataclysm).
Photoshop image of asteroid passing by the Earth at extremely close range. (Kevin M. Gill/CC BY 2.0).
While 2024 XN1 is getting all the attention, it is not the only asteroid slated to come close to the Earth over the Christmas holiday. On Christmas Day two smaller asteroids, labeled 2020 XY and 2020 YM1, will also pass by us at what NASA considers a near distance. Fortunately both of these objects are following a path that will cause them miss the planet completely as well.
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The Christmas Eve asteroid is expected to make its closest approach to the Earth at 2:56 GMT on December 24th. It will not be visible from the ground, unless of course it really is on a collision course with the planet (NASA might be covering up the truth to prevent a mass panic, some conspiracy theorists are suggesting).
Assuming the asteroid does pass by quietly, as NASA is predicting publicly, the citizens of Earth will have yet another reason to thank their blessings this holiday season.
Top image: Artist’s impression of a massive space object crashing into the Earth.
Source: Don Davis/NASA/Public Domain.
By Nathan Falde
