Asteroid 2025 QV5 was first spotted on August 24. It will reach its closest approach on September 3 and will not be this close to us for exactly 100 years. (Image credit: Juan Gartner via Getty Images)
A bus-sized asteroid, first spotted just over a week ago, will fly past Earth tomorrow (September 3). The space rock will not be this close to us until September 4, 2125 – nearly a century from now.
The asteroid, dubbed 2025 QV5, was first spotted on Aug. 24. It's about 35 feet (11 meters) in diameter, about the length of a school bus, and is hurtling toward us at more than 13,900 mph (22,400 km/h), according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Asteroid Observatory.
The space object will make its closest approach to Earth on Wednesday, passing within 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers) of our planet, about twice as far away as the moon, according to JPL's small-body database.
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2025 QV5 orbits the Sun in a nearly circular orbit, completing one orbit around our star every 359.4 days. During this time, it drifts between the orbits of Earth and Venus, experiencing the gentle tug between the two planets. As a result, it is unlikely to ever collide with us. Even if it did, it is too small to be considered “potentially hazardous,” and most of its material would likely burn up in the atmosphere.
However, scientists are still eager to learn as much as possible about the space rock, and it has been added to the list of targets for NASA's Goldstone Radar Telescope in Barstow, California, which specializes in tracking and imaging near-Earth asteroids, in the coming days.
Asteroid 2025 QV5's orbit around the Sun takes it close to both Earth and Venus, and will fly past the latter more frequently over much of the next century.
Over the next century, asteroid 2025 QV5 will make several more “close approaches” to Earth, including flybys in 2026 and 2027. However, these flybys will be at much greater distances from our planet. For example, next year the asteroid will come within 5.3 million kilometers (3.3 million miles) of us, while in 2027 it will again be three times as far away.
The next time the space object will come this close will be on Sept. 4, 2125 — about 100 years, 1 day and 2 hours after its current flyby — when it will be about 830,000 miles (1.3 million km) from Earth, according to current calculations from the Small-Body Database Lookup.
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However, the future date and distance of this cosmic coincidence are not fixed.
As they gather data on 2025 QV5's motion, researchers will be able to refine the object's orbital trajectory, which will change when it is likely to return. For example, the likelihood of the potential “city-killer” asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth in 2032, which was reported earlier this year, changed frequently before eventually dropping to zero as researchers collected more observations of the space object.
Asteroids can also be deflected by gravitational interactions with other objects, such as planets and larger bodies. If 2025 QV5 were to pass an undiscovered asteroid between Earth and Venus in the next 100 years, we might not even know it had changed course until it was no longer on its expected trajectory.
Harry BakerNavigate Social LinksSenior Staff Writer
Harry is a senior writer for Live Science based in the UK. Before becoming a journalist, he studied marine biology at the University of Exeter. He covers a wide range of topics, including space exploration, planetology, space weather, climate change, animal behaviour and palaeontology. His recent work on solar maximum won the 2024 Aerospace Media Awards in the Best Space Story category and was shortlisted for the 2023 NCTJ Awards for Excellence in the Breaking News category. He also writes Live Science’s weekly series Earth from Space.
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