Christmas Eve asteroid to make ‘close approach’ to Earth

Are we about to get Jingle Bell rock-ed?

Santa Claus isn’t the only thing making a fly-by of Earth this week. NASA has warned that a giant asteroid the size of a 10-story building will be whizzing right past us tonight.

Dubbed 2024 XN1, the space rock will be jetting by us at a distance of 4.48 million miles from Earth when it makes its closest approach just before 10 pm, per the space org’s Asteroid Watch dashboard.

While this is considered a “close approach” by interstellar standards — NASA defines near-Earth objects (NEOs) as those that come within 4.6 million miles — we’re not about to get some cosmic coal shoved down our stockings so to speak.

“It will be very far away, around 18 times further away from the Earth than the Moon is, and so with this predicted path won’t come close enough to hit the Earth,” Jess Lee, an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, told the Daily Mail.

If it did this would be cataclysmic given that 2024 XN1 — which was spotted on December 12 — measures between 95-230 feet and is traveling at around 14,743mph.

Scientists estimate that the impact would be equivalent to 12 million tonnes of TNT and flatten an area of 700 square miles, the Daily Mail reported.

“If you’d like to compare it to a previous asteroid impact, the Tunguska Event in Russia in 1908 involved an asteroid which was a roughly similar size to this one,” said Ms. Lee. “It exploded above the ground and knocked down 80 million trees.”

After 2024 XN1’s festive flyby, the rock star won’t be making its Earth comeback tour until January 2031, when it will pass within 3.1 million miles.

Meanwhile, the next truly large asteroid to pay us a visit will be on January 5, 2025, when a 1,310-foot intergalactic gravel stone will fly within 2.29 million miles of us, the Daily Mail reported.

While the space rocks aren’t on a collision course, these celestial close shaves emphasize the need to keep better tabs on NEOs.

Currently, “the orbit of each object is computed by finding the elliptical path through space that best fits all the available observations, which often span many orbits over many years or decades,” NASA writes. “As more observations are made, the accuracy of an object’s orbit improves dramatically, and it becomes possible to predict where an object will be years or even decades into the future – and whether it could come close to Earth.”

Thankfully it could soon be infinitely easier to spot space rocks heading for Earth.

Spanish scientists have devised a way to calculate the gravitational bending of light to pinpoint their exact position.