The Near-Earth Asteroid 2026 JH2 is moving away from Earth
An asteroid about the size of a very large house – 25 meters in diameter – passed within just 91,593 kilometers of Earth's surface on Monday, May 18, at around 11:30 p.m., roughly a quarter of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. It had been detected only a week earlier, on May 10, by an observatory in Arizona. It was photographed as it moved away from Earth by the TRAPPIST-South telescope, located in Chile.
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mall asteroids less than 5 meters in diameter, about the size of a car, pass between the Earth and the Moon every week and are discovered at the last minute due to their high speed and very small size. Sometimes they collide with Earth's atmosphere and disintegrate almost completely, potentially resulting in a meteor shower (as in the recent fall on March 6 in Germany). Asteroids the size of 25 meters, like 2026 JH2, are rarer, but several still pass between Earth and the Moon each year. An asteroid of this size disintegrated in 2013, 30 km above the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia. This is a very rare event, estimated at only one or two per century. Despite its proximity, 2026 JH2 poses no danger of impacting Earth; its orbit was quickly determined with great precision, taking into account Earth's influence. On the night of May 18, 12 hours after its closest approach to Earth, the asteroid was captured from Chile by the TRAPPIST-South telescope of the University of Liège. Along with its counterpart TRAPPIST-North based in Morocco, these two Liège-based instruments are part of an international network for monitoring near-Earth asteroids.
The TRAPPIST-South robotic telescope from the University of Liège, installed at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The near-Earth asteroid 2026 JH2 appears as a small point of light on May 19th, while the stars in the background are elongated due to the 15-second exposure time of the photograph. © Emmanuel Jehin
In this animation, the asteroid appears as a small point of light because the telescope was adjusted to track its path across the sky. The stars in the background are consequently elongated due to the length of the successive 15-second exposures. The asteroid was moving away from Earth at very high speed, approximately 8 km/second or 28,800 km/hour! It was already at a distance of about 360,500 km. In a few days, it will no longer be visible, being too far away even for the largest telescopes. New observatories on Earth and in space are currently under construction to try to catalog as many of the largest of these near-Earth asteroids as possible, which could potentially be hazardous. More than 3,500 asteroids 150 meters in diameter or larger, approaching within five times the distance of the Moon, have already been discovered, and, fortunately, none pose a risk to Earth in the coming century.
The orbit of the near-Earth asteroid 2026 JH2 which passed very close to Earth on the night of May 18, 2026.
