May 18. Mark the calendar. Or don’t, your loss. A chunk of space debris roughly the size of a blue whale is coming our way. Close. Very close.
Not impact-close. That would be rude of the universe, wouldn’t it? It’s flyby-close. The object, labeled 2026 JH1 by astronomers (though some sources call it 2025 YN28 or similar depending on when you read this, but let’s stick to the text: 2026 JH2 ), was found on May 10. Mount Lemmon Survey spotted it in Arizona. Follow-ups suggest it’s between 52 and 141 feet wide. Give or take. Based on brightness mostly. ESA says so.
The close approach happens at 5:23 p.m. EDT on the 18th. GMT lovers note: 2123.
Distance? About 56,000 miles. To put that in perspective: the Moon hangs at roughly 238,000 miles out. This rock is doing its dance at 24% that distance. It’s rushing past at 19,000 mph. Fast enough to make you think about insurance policies, but no. It won’t hit us. It won’t even kiss the Moon. It’s just visiting.
Watch the streak
You can’t see it with naked eyes. Sorry. You need telescopes. And someone to operate them for you. Enter the Virtual Telescope Project. They’re live-streaming the thing on YouTube.
Free. Weather permitting. Stream starts at 3:45 p.m. EDT. Gianluca Masi, the guy running the show, says the asteroid moves fast against the starry background. Like, really fast. The telescopes in Manciano, Italy, will lock on and track it.
“We will see it like a sharp dot… with stars leaving long streaks,” Masi says.
Brightness peaks at magnitude 11.5. That’s dim. Very dim to humans, but bright enough for serious glass to pick out the moving pixel. As the Earth spins and the asteroid swings away, it sets below their horizon. Gone.
Why bother? Because space is vast, but sometimes things come uncomfortably near. And it’s nice to know exactly where that specific blue-whale-rock is. It passes through our neighborhood at 56,625 miles out. Not threatening. Just present.
The stream cuts when the star moves out of view. The asteroid keeps going, off into the dark, presumably. We go back to work.
