The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is monitoring a “potentially hazardous” asteroid that will pass close to Earth on Tuesday.
NASA told Fox News Digital that the rock object, named 2024 ON, is 1,120 feet long and 600 feet wide, roughly 1,150 feet by 590 feet, making it larger than previous estimates.
NASA considered the asteroid to be “stadium-sized” and reported it was 621,000 miles from Earth on Tuesday morning, which is considered a relatively close distance. Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Fox News Digital that an asteroid this size only comes this close to Earth once every five to 10 years.
Farnocchia, who works at the institute’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said the last time a large meteorite entered Earth’s atmosphere was in Russia in 2013. No meteorite the size of 2024 ON has struck Earth since prehistoric times.
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NASA announced that a stadium-sized asteroid will pass “relatively close” to Earth on Tuesday. (iStock)
Although the asteroid is close enough to Earth to be considered a “potentially hazardous object,” Farnocchia said there is no chance the asteroid will collide with Earth — an asteroid would need to be within a few hundred miles of Earth to be of concern.
“We’re actually looking at the possibility of an impact not just in the near future, but in the next 100 years,” the engineer explained, “and there’s no chance of an impact in the next 100 years.”
The asteroid is one of five that will pass Earth over the next two days, although the other rocky objects will not get as close to Earth as they will in 2024 ON. The four asteroids are between 1.1 million and 3.9 million miles from Earth, and three of them are roughly 51 feet in diameter, the size of a house.


According to NASA, 2024 ON will be 621,000 miles from Earth on Tuesday night. (NASA)
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One of the asteroids, called 2013 FW13, is about 510 feet in diameter and is scheduled to pass Earth on Wednesday.
NASA’s Asteroid Monitoring Dashboard, which tracks “asteroids and comets that come relatively close to Earth,” says the data sheet, which says that 2024 ON was moving at about 5.5 miles per second, or about 20,000 miles per hour, as of Tuesday morning.
“For each encounter, the dashboard displays the date of closest approach, the object’s approximate diameter, relative size, and distance from Earth,” the organization’s website explains.


NASA announced that a stadium-sized asteroid will pass “relatively close” to Earth on Tuesday. (iStock)
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“The dashboard shows the next five Earth close approaches within 4.6 million miles (7.5 million kilometers, or 19.5 times the distance to the moon). Any object larger than about 150 meters that could approach Earth within this distance is called a potentially hazardous object.”