Tuesdays Meteor is Twice as Massive as the Empire State Building

A meteor more than twice as massive as the Empire State Building is hurling it's way toward Earth!  But don't worry...unlike the so-called planet-killer in the Netflix movie "Don't Look Up," this space rock will not take out mankind.

On Tuesday, January 18th, at 3:51pm Central, the asteroid will be bright enough to be seen in a "dark-sky location at night with a backyard telescope."  But as you know...we don't necessarily live in a "dark-sky location" at 3:51.  So we may be out of luck.

According to LiveScience.com:

The stony asteroid, known as (7482) 1994 PC1, will pass at its closest on Jan. 18 at 4:51 p.m. EST (2151 GMT), traveling at 43,754 mph (70,415 km/h) and hurtling past Earth at a distance of 0.01324 astronomical units — 1.2 million miles ( nearly 2 million kilometers), according to NASA JPL-Caltech's Solar System Dynamics (SSD).

Don't worry.  If it's too early for us to see this one we've got plenty more coming our way (he says with a quiver in his voice having just seen "Don't Look Up"). This meteor has been by before.  Apparently these types of space junk get put into a data base (none of which currently pose a serious impact threat for the next 100 years or more) and was seen before in 1994.  It got a lot closer to us, by their calculations, in 1933 when it was 699,000 miles from us.  It won't come that close to us again until 2105.

"But as larger and more advanced survey telescopes turbocharge the search over the next few years, a rapid uptick in discoveries is expected," according to the CNEOS.