Meet The Asteroid Hurtling Toward Earth

ACROSS AMERICA — Wow: 2020 just won't quit. It's throwing us another curveball.

It's not a curveball in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a refrigerator-size asteroid hurtling toward Earth, according to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who took to social media Saturday to warn Earthlings about "Asteroid 2018VP1."

According to Tyson's post on Instagram, the space rock is rushing toward the Earth at an estimated 25,000 miles per hour and is expected to "buzz-cut" the planet on Nov. 2, Election Day eve.

Luckily, Tyson said, the asteroid is unlikely to worsen 2020.

"But it’s not big enough to cause harm. So if the World ends in 2020, it won’t be the fault of the Universe," the scientist wrote online.

The reality, according to Newsweek, is that the asteroid could pass as close as 4,776 miles above Earth’s center, cutting through the planet’s outlying exosphere. The rock could also miss Earth entirely, passing by the planet at a distance of up to 260,276 miles away

Even if Asteroid 2018VP1 changes course and heads directly toward Earth's surface, it's unlikely the rock will make it to the ground at all.

NASA estimates all space rocks smaller than 25 meters will burn up as they pass through Earth's atmosphere due to friction caused by air particles. The asteroid in question is less than 2 meters in diameter.

It would take an asteroid between 25 meters and 1 kilometer in size to cause local damage. An asteroid larger than 1 or 2 kilometers could have worldwide effects.

NASA says Asteroid 2018VP1 has been orbiting the sun and bypassing Earth for decades.

The space agency's Center for Near Earth Object Studies shows the fridge-size chunk of space debris passed by the planet in 1970, 2005, 2007 and 2018. It has also bypassed Mars in 2004 and the moon in 2018.

Meanwhile, an asteroid much farther away is already making history on Earth.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission on Tuesday afternoon is set to make its first-ever touch-and-go landing on an asteroid named Bennu in an attempt to collect dirt and rock samples. A live broadcast of the attempted touch-and-go maneuver will be broadcast on NASA's website starting at 5 p.m. ET.

The asteroid contains materials from the early solar system and could give clues about the very molecules that later became Earth's oceans, according to a news release from NASA.

Bennu is said to be as tall as the Empire State Building and has a 1 in 2,700 chance of striking Earth late in the next century — when 2020 will be light years in the past.

OSIRIS-REx left Earth just over four years ago and arrived at Bennu in December 2018. During its 14-year mission, the spacecraft will orbit the asteroid for over 400 days before returning its samples to scientists on Earth.