The bus-sized asteroid, first discovered about a week ago, zooms past Earth today (September 3). Spacelock will not be able to make this any closer again until September 4th, 2125.
The asteroid, known as the 2025 QV5, was first discovered on August 24th. This is about 35 feet (11 meters) in diameter, or the same width as the school bus width, heading towards us at over 13,900 mph (22,400 km/h), according to NASA’s Jet Project Lab Tagator (JPL).
According to a search in the JPL body database, Spacelock will approach Earth, within 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers) on Wednesday, or within a month about twice as far as the moon, or about twice as far as the moon.
The 2025 QV5 has an almost circular orbit around the sun, circling the home star every 359.4 days. During this time, it is subtly pulled left and right between the two planets, causing it to float between Earth and Venus orbit. As a result, it rarely hits us. And even so, even so, it is too small to be considered “potentially dangerous,” and most of the material can burn out into the atmosphere.
Nevertheless, scientists are still keen to learn as much as they can about Space Lock, and are listed as targets for NASA’s Goldstone Radar Telescope in Burstow, California.
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2025 QV5 will take an even more “close approach” to the Earth over the next centuries, including the 2026 and 2027 Flybys. However, these flybees occur farther from our planet. For example, next year, asteroids will only come within 3.3 million miles (5.3 million km) of the United States. If they pass in 2027, they’re three times more apart.
According to current calculations from searches in small databases, the next time the Space Lock will return to this area is September 4, 2125, reaching approximately 100 years, a day and two hours after the current flyby, reaching approximately 830,000 miles (1.3 million km) from Earth.
However, the accidental future dates and distances of this universe are not fixed.
Researchers collect more data on the movement of the 2025 QV5, which could improve the more accurate orbital trajectory of the object. For example, the possibility that a potential “urban killer” asteroid 2024 YR4 hit Earth in 2032 was made headlines earlier this year, but it eventually fell to zero as researchers collated more observations on Space Lock.
Asteroids can also be knocked off the course due to gravity interactions with other objects, such as planets and larger space rocks. If the 2025 QV5 drifts past an undiscovered asteroid between Earth and Venus over the next 100 years, you may not even know that it has been redirected to the point that it appears in the future in the future.
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