A recently discovered asteroid will pass by Earth this weekend, providing sky gazers with a sneak preview of the space rock flyby today (June 5), Space.com reported.
Nicknamed "The Beast," asteroid 2014 HQ124 will pass by Earth at a distance of three times between the Earth and the moon.
Discovered on April 23 by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, a sky-mapping space telescope, the football stadium-sized asteroid poses no threat of hitting the Earth on its flyby on Sunday (June 8).
You can watch the live show above from the Slooh Space Camera starting at 2:30 p.m. EDT (11:30 a.m. PDT/1830 GMT). Slooh's astronomers will be broadcasting live from Australia with time-lapse footage from their robotic observatory in Chile, featuring a discussion with Slooh astronomer Bob Berman, host Geoff Fox and asteroid impact expert Mark Boslough.
Traveling at a speed of 31,000 mph, the Beast is estimated to be a little more than 1,000 feet wide, about the size of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. According to the Wired, astronomers originally thought it was about three times bigger based on its brightness, but as it got closer, better measurements showed it to be smaller.
Berman said it is "disconcerting" that an asteroid this large flying so close to the planet was only spotted less than two months before its nearest approach to Earth.
"HQ124 is at least 10 times bigger, and possibly 20 times, than the asteroid that injured a thousand people last year in Chelyabinsk, Siberia," Berman said in a statement. "If it were [to] impact us, the energy released would be measured not in kilotons like the atomic bombs that ended World War II, but in H-bomb type megatons."
Last month, Slooh and NASA teamed up to get citizen scientists involved in using Slooh's telescopes to help find, monitor and characterize near-Earth objects and hunt for killer asteroids.
"While astronomers believe we have spotted 90 percent of the potentially dangerous asteroids that are 1,000 feet wide or bigger, they estimate we have detected only 30 percent of the objects that are around 460 feet wide and just 1 percent of objects the size of The Beast," Wired reported.
