Newly Found Truck-Sized Asteroid to Whiz by Earth June 8

By Nancy Atkinson - June 7, 2013 at 4:52 PM UTC | Planetary Science
2013-lr6.jpg

A truck-sized asteroid just discovered yesterday (Thursday, June 6) will give Earth a relatively close shave later today/early tomorrow, depending on your time zone. Asteroid 2013 LR6 is somewhere between 5- 16 meters (16 to 54 feet) in diameter and will be flying by at only about 111,000 kilometers (69,000 mi, 0.29x Lunar Distances) from Earth at 4:43UTC/12:43AM EDT on June 8, 2013.

This is similar in size to the space rock that

exploded over Russia back in February of this year.

The Russian asteroid was about 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter before it exploded in an airburst event about 20-25 km (12-15 miles) above Earth's surface.

Find out how you can watch the flyby live online, below.

This flyby is not at close as February's 2012 DA14 flyby, but it indeed is quite close by Solar System standards. It will be speeding by 9.8 km a second (6.14 mi/s). The asteroid was first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey and now several other observatories have made follow-up observations to verify and help determine its size and orbit.

According to the

Minor Planet Center's Twitter feed

,

2013 LR6 is the 167th minor planetary object discovered so far in the month of June 2013!

That is incredible, and as astronomer

Nick Howes said via Twitter,

"That number should give people a good heads up as to why searching is important."

According to our

David Dickinson

, 2013 LR6 will be plunging thru the constellation Vela at closest approach tonight, but it will be a faint one, as it won't break +13 magnitude.

Since this discovery is so new, Gianluca Masi and the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy has put together a last-minute opportunity to watch the flyby live, online via their telescopes.

The online event is scheduled for June 7, 2013 at 21:30 UTC. To watch, go to the

Virtual Telescope project's webcast page.

Update: Here's an image taken during the webcast:

[caption id="attachment_102765" align="aligncenter" width="580"]

Near-Earth Asteroid 2013 LR6 approaching the Earth, about 300,000 km away. Credit: Virtual Telescope Project. [/caption]

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com