An asteroid known as 2025 PM with a diameter of about 50 meters will pass Earth on August 17 at a distance approximately equivalent to the distance between our planet and the Moon, the laboratory of solar astronomy of the Space Research Institute (IKI) of the Russian Academy of Sciences told TASS.
"On August 17, asteroid 2025 PM will pass by at a distance of approximately one diameter of the lunar orbit from Earth. This is one of the closest approaches of an object of such a size in recent time so it has been included in the potentially hazardous list," the laboratory said.
2025 PM is one of the largest asteroids recently getting closer than one million kilometers near Earth. The passage of a larger object at a comparable distance is expected only once this year, at the end of September.
The asteroid was detected on August 1. It does not display any cometary properties, and, according to preliminary data, is a stone rock without any traces of volatile substances. It is an Apollo-categorized asteroid from a group of near-Earth asteroids with their orbits intersecting Earth’s orbit from the outside. 2025 PM’s orbital period is slightly over two years.
The asteroid will come the closest to Earth on August 17 at 9:03 a.m. GMT. According to calculations, despite being within Earth’s gravitational pull, the probability of its "capture" is very low and may occur only in the event of an unforeseen collision with another celestial body.
The laboratory reiterated that the most well-known fall to Earth of a meteorite of a comparable size occurred about 50,000 years ago, creating the Barringer Crater in Arizona in the US.
MNA/
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