Four Plane-Sized Asteroids Approaching Earth This Weekend

Several enormous asteroids are set to soar past the Earth between Friday and Sunday, each as large as an airplane.

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), one of these four asteroids—named 2023 KS2—is due to fly by on June 2, while the other three—2023 HO18, 2023 JR2 and 2023 JE5—are set to pass two days later.

Another smaller asteroid named 2023 KZ2, around the size of a house, is also forecast to skim past the Earth on June 2.

Asteroids are chunks of rock and ice floating around our solar system, many of which are thought to be left over from the formation of the planets.

"Asteroids are 'bits of a planet that didn't happen' that orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the main asteroid belt. However, as they are relatively small, asteroids can be disturbed quite easily, so they can develop orbits that cross those of planets," Jay Tate, the director of the U.K.'s Spaceguard Center observatory, previously told Newsweek.

Asteroid 2023 KS2 is thought to be around 68 feet across, while 2023 HO18, 2023 JR2 and 2023 JE5 are around 99, 120 and 110 feet across, respectively. A Boeing 737 is around 94 feet long.

These asteroids are due to pass by the Earth at a distance of roughly 2,450,000 miles for 2023 KS2, 4,050,000 miles for 2023 JR2, and 4,190,000 miles for 2023 JE5, while 2023 HO18 is due to pass a lot closer at a mere 290,000 miles. This is equal to around 1.2 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. For context, Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor, only approaches us at a distance of 38 million miles away at its closest point.

NASA previously estimated that around 1.1 million asteroids are in our solar system, the majority of which occupy the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The largest include Ceres and Vesta, which have diameters of 587 miles and 329 miles, respectively.

Occasionally, asteroids in the asteroid belt are ejected into the inner solar system due to gravitational interactions with Jupiter, sending them soaring towards the Earth's orbit. These asteroids are defined as "near-Earth objects" (NEOs) if they pass within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit. NASA has identified more than 31,000 of these NEOs. NEOs that come within 4.6 million miles of Earth's orbit, and also measure greater than 460 feet in diameter are called "potentially hazardous objects," of which 2,300 have been identified.

According to these classifications, all of the asteroids due to pass this weekend are NEOs, but none are "potentially hazardous," as they aren't large enough.

"The potentially hazardous designation simply means over many centuries and millennia the asteroid's orbit may evolve into one that has a chance of impacting Earth. We do not assess these long-term, many-century possibilities of impact," Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, told Newsweek last year.

Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) data states that these four plane-sized asteroids are extremely unlikely to collide with the Earth, with a collision probability of 0.000002 for 2023 JE5. No probability data is available for the other asteroids.

NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office states that we are very unlikely to see an asteroid of this ilk hitting our planet anytime soon, as there are no potentially hazardous objects that currently have any viable chance of colliding with Earth over the next 100 years.

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