【AI前沿】Asteroid 2026 JH2 Is About to Fly Right Past Earth—Relatively Speaking

Anna Lisa BonfranceschiScienceMay 16, 2026 5:00 AMAsteroid 2026 JH2 Is About to Fly Right Past Earth—Relatively SpeakingOn May 18, an asteroid about the size of Chicago’s Cloud Gate will fly four times closer to Earth than the moon.Photograph: buradaki/iStock/Getty Images PlusCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storylook up! Asteroid2026 JH2 is now approaching Earth; the object, which is about 20 meters (66 feet) in diameter—comparable to Chicago’sCloud Gatesculpture—will pass by on May 18. Enthusiasts will be able to observe it using a telescope or during alive broadcast organizedby Virtual Telescope.The object will pass at a minimum distance from Earth of about 57,000 miles—much closer than the moon, which is about four times farther away. Among the tracked near-earth objects, or NEOs, that will pass near the planet over the next few months, it will come theclosest.There are tens of thousands of NEOs, which are generally of no particular concern; they are, of course, monitored, and some do have a (small) risk of impacting Earth in the next few years. According toNew Scientist, 2026 JH2 is not among them, despite the widespread use of hyperbolic terms like “grazing” to describe how near it will come.An Apollo-Type NeoAsteroid 2026 JH2istechnicallyan Apollo-type NEO, according to aclassificationsystem that takes into consideration the characteristics of the object’s orbit. An Apollo-type object has a semi-major axis larger than Earth’s (and therefore greater than one astronomical unit, the distance that separates us from the sun), and a perihelion (the shortest distance from the sun) of less than 1.017 astronomical units. (All asteroids and comets with a perihelion of less than 1.3 astronomical units are considered NEOs.)Its passage, while noteworthy, is not rare; in fact, in the past year, many objects have come as close if not closer. Noteworthy among these was, for example, the passage of the small asteroid2025 TFabout 260 miles) from Earth’s surface.This story originally appeared onWIRED Italiaand has been translated from Italian.