look up! Asteroid 2026 JH2 is now approaching Earth; the object, which is about 20 meters (66 feet) in diameter—comparable to Chicago’s Cloud Gate sculpture—will pass by on May 18. Enthusiasts will be able to observe it using a telescope or during a live broadcast organized by Virtual Telescope.
The object will pass at a minimum distance from Earth of about 57,000 miles—much closer than the moon, which is about four times farther away. Among the tracked near-earth objects, or NEOs, that will pass near the planet over the next few months, it will come the closest.
There are tens of thousands of NEOs, which are generally of no particular concern; they are, of course, monitored, and some do have a (small) risk of impacting Earth in the next few years. According to New Scientist, 2026 JH2 is not among them, despite the widespread use of hyperbolic terms like “grazing” to describe how near it will come.
An Apollo-Type Neo
Asteroid 2026 JH2 is technically an Apollo-type NEO, according to a classification system that takes into consideration the characteristics of the object’s orbit. An Apollo-type object has a semi-major axis larger than Earth’s (and therefore greater than one astronomical unit, the distance that separates us from the sun), and a perihelion (the shortest distance from the sun) of less than 1.017 astronomical units. (All asteroids and comets with a perihelion of less than 1.3 astronomical units are considered NEOs.)
Its passage, while noteworthy, is not rare; in fact, in the past year, many objects have come as close if not closer. Noteworthy among these was, for example, the passage of the small asteroid 2025 TF about 260 miles) from Earth’s surface.
This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.
