Asteroid 2002 AJ129 will pass close to Earth on February 4, 2018 at 21:30 GMT. At the time of the closest approach, the asteroid will be less than 10 times the distance between Earth and the Moon (approximately 4.2 million kilometers).
2002 AJ129 is a near-Earth asteroid of intermediate size, between 0.5 and 1.2 kilometers wide. It was discovered on January 15, 2002 by the Earth-asteroid tracking project sponsored by NASA at the Maui space surveillance site in Haleakala, Hawaii. The speed of the asteroid at the time of closest approach, 34 kilometers per second, is higher than most near-Earth objects during an overflight on Earth. The high speed of overflight is the result of the orbit of the asteroid, which is very close to the Sun: 18 million kilometers. Although the 2002 asteroid AJ129 is categorized as a potentially dangerous asteroid, it poses no real threat of collision with our planet in the foreseeable future.
"We have been following this asteroid for more than 14 years and we know its orbit very accurately," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. , California. "Our calculations indicate that asteroid 2002 AJ129 has no chance of colliding with Earth on February 4 or at any time during the next 100 years."