Stadium-Sized Asteroid Will Pass by Earth on Tuesday — and NASA Says It's Coming Back

Mar. 15, 2025

Planet Earth and big asteroid in the space.Photo:Getty

Getty

The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratoryissued an alertfor a “stadium-size” asteroid approaching Earth on Tuesday, Sept. 17. Four other asteroids were also included in the warning.

The four additional asteroids varied in size, with three said to be the size of houses and one the size of a building.

“The dashboard displays the next five Earth approaches to within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers or 19.5 times the distance to the moon),” per NASA’s Asteroid Watch Dashboard. “An object larger than about 150 meters that can approach the Earth to within this distance is termed a potentially hazardous object.”

Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

The latest asteroid comes a year after NASA said another asteroid — this one the size of the Empire State Building —could hit Earth in less than 200 years.

The near-Earth object, named Bennu, has been the focus of NASA research — and the OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) spacecraft — since the asteroid’s discovery in 1999,NASAsaid at the time.

Studying Bennu is imperative because the asteroid has a slim shot of eventually hitting Earth.NASA saidina 2021 paperfrom the OSIRIS-REx science team gives Bennu a [one-in-2,700] chance of impacting Earth on Sept. 24, 2182.

Previously, it had “three close encounters [with Earth] in 1999, 2005 and 2011,” per the paper.

source: people.com