Asteroid 7335 (1989 JA) is a apollo class asteroid whose orbit crosses the orbit of Earth. NASA JPL has classified 1989 JA as a « Potentially Hazardous Asteroid » due to its predicted close passes with Earth
Asteroid 1989 JA is a stony Apollo-type asteroid Similar to the Chelyabinsk asteroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere in 2013, shattering windows over six Russian cities.
Asteroid 1989 JA won’t get that close. But the May 27 approach is the closest calculated pass of this particular space rock to date, and for the next 200 years.
Asteroid 1989 JA orbits the sun every 861 days (2.36 years), coming as close as 0.91 Astronomical Unit and reaching as far as 2.63 Astronomical Unit from the sun.
Asteroid 1989 JA is about 1.1 kilometers in diameter, making it larger than 99% of asteroids.
It has an estimated diameter of 3,609 feet (1,100 meters, or about 10 American football fields laid end to end). Closest approach to Earth happens at 14:26 UTC (10:26 ET) on May 27
But the best opportunity to get a glimpse through backyard telescopes comes two nights before its closest flyby, when the space rock will be reflecting sunlight more efficiently.
NASA monitors NEOs like this one closely, and recently launched a mission to test whether potentially hazardous asteroids could one day be deflected from a collision course with Earth. In November 2021, NASA launched a spacecraft called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which will collide head-on into the 525-foot-wide (160 meters) Dimorphos asteroid in autumn 2022. The collision won’t destroy the asteroid, but it may change the rock’s orbital path slightly, Live Science previously reported.
