NASA Monitoring Bus-Sized Asteroid Heading Earthward

An asteroid the size of a school bus is heading towards our planet, zipping past us twice as close as our own moon today.

The asteroid, named 2025 AB, is one of the first handful of asteroids discovered in the new year, and measures between 32.8 and 72.2 feet in diameter.

In comparison, the average American school bus is about 35 to 40 feet long.

2025 AB is expected to pass our planet at a distance of about 95,200 miles on January 3, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. The moon orbits the Earth at an average distance of 238,900 miles.

The asteroid will zoom past us at a speed of around 11.33 km/s, or roughly 25,300 mph, which is several times faster than even the speediest bullets.

"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, director of the U.K.'s Spaceguard Centre observatory, previously told Newsweek.

Due to its proximity to our planet, 2025 AB is classified as a near-Earth object or NEO, defined as objects within 30 million miles of Earth. There are around 36,000 objects in our solar system classified as NEOs.

Some asteroids are additionally classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) or potentially hazardous objects (PHOs), which are defined as coming within around 4.6 million miles of Earth and having a diameter of at least 460 feet across.

"A PHA is one that has an orbit intersecting the Earth's orbit around the sun by less than 0.05 astronomical units (1 AU is the distance to the Sun), that's just over 4.5 million miles," Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the U.K., previously told Newsweek.

"It also has to have an absolute brightness of 22.0 or less (lower values of the magnitude are brighter = larger objects), i.e. an asteroid (or comet) that would cause significant regional damage if it hit the Earth," he said. "Not all NEOs are potentially hazardous, but all hazardous objects are NEOs."

There are also four other asteroids zipping close to the Earth over the coming days, including the house-sized 2024 YC9, the bus-sized 2024 YL1 and the plane-sized 2025 AE passing today, as well as the plane-sized 2024 YL7 passing tomorrow.

All of these other near-approaches are coming much less close to the Earth than 2025 AB, however, and are all only classified as NEOs, not PHAs.

Even if they were PHAs, this classification doesn't necessarily mean an asteroid is actually at risk of hitting our planet.

"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, previously told Newsweek.

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