A recently discovered astroid nicknamed The Beast will pass by Earth today at a distance three times that between the Earth and the moon. You can watch the live show above from the Slooh Space Camera starting at 11:30 PT. Slooh’s astronomers will be broadcasting live from Australia with time-lapse footage from their robotic observatory in Chile.
The Beast, officially named Asteroid 2014 HQ124, is traveling at 31,000 mph and is estimated to be a little more than 1,000 feet wide, about the size of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer first detected the asteroid on April 23. Astronomers originally thought it was about three times bigger based on its brightness, but as it got closer, better measurements showed it was smaller.
Though The Beast is big enough to do serious damage were it to impact Earth (objects as small as 100 feet wide could be destructive) it will not come close enough to be dangerous. Recently Slooh and NASA teamed up to get citizen scientists involved in helping to find, monitor and characterize near-Earth objects using Slooh’s telescopes. While astronomers believe we have spotted 90 percent of the potentially dangerous asteroids that are 1,000 feet wide or bigger, they estimate we have detected only 30 percent of the objects that are around 460 feet wide and just 1 percent of objects the size of The Beast.
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