Honestly, whenever you hear about an asteroid passing Earth today live, your brain probably goes straight to a Hollywood disaster flick. You know the one—somber music, a frantic scientist pointing at a flickering monitor, and a giant rock that looks like a bruised potato hurtling toward a populated city.
But out here in the real world? It's actually way more interesting. And way less scary.
Today, January 18, 2026, the focus of the global space-tracking community is on a specific chunk of solar system history called 2026 AS1. This isn't some world-ending behemoth. It's basically a space rock about the size of a standard house—roughly 20 meters (65 feet) across. It’s currently making its closest approach at a distance of about 8.2 lunar distances.
Wait, what does that actually mean?
Basically, it's passing about 1.95 million miles (3.1 million km) away from us. In cosmic terms, that's a "near miss." In human terms? It's like a fly buzzing past you from three blocks away.
The Live Stats for Asteroid 2026 AS1
If you're looking for the hard numbers on today's visitor, NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have been pinging this thing for days.
Here is the breakdown of what's happening right now:
- Designation: 2026 AS1
- Size: Approximately 15 to 35 meters (it’s a bit fuzzy until we get better radar returns).
- Speed: A blistering 7.1 kilometers per second. That’s about 15,800 miles per hour.
- Distance: 8.2 Lunar Distances (LD). One LD is the average gap between us and the Moon.
- Today's Schedule: It reaches its "nominal" close approach point during the early hours of UTC today.
Is it dangerous? Not even a little bit.
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Even if 2026 AS1 decided to take a wrong turn and head straight for us, an object this size usually breaks up in the upper atmosphere. You'd get a spectacular fireball, maybe some broken windows if it happened right over a city (similar to the Chelyabinsk event in 2013), but it’s not an "extinction-level event."
Why We Track These Things Live
You might wonder why we even bother tracking something that’s two million miles away and relatively small.
Basically, it's practice.
The NASA Asteroid Watch dashboard and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) NEO Coordination Centre are constantly refining their math. Every time a rock like 2026 AS1 flies by, astronomers use it to calibrate their instruments. They track its "albedo" (how much light it reflects) to figure out if it’s made of solid metal or just a loose pile of space gravel.
We have found over 34,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) to date. Most of them are tiny. The big ones—the ones over a kilometer wide that could actually cause global trouble—we’ve already found about 95% of them. None of those are hitting us in the next century.
What's tricky are the "city-killers." These are asteroids between 50 and 140 meters. They’re big enough to wipe out a metropolitan area but small enough to be hard to spot until they're close.
How to Watch the Asteroid Passing Earth Today Live
Okay, let's be real: you aren't going to see this with your naked eyes.
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2026 AS1 has a visual magnitude of around 20.9. For context, the human eye can see up to about magnitude 6. The higher the number, the fainter the object. You’d need a serious professional-grade telescope to even spot a tiny, moving dot.
However, you can still "watch" it.
- The Virtual Telescope Project: Gianluca Masi, an astronomer based in Italy, often runs live webcasts for significant flybys. He uses high-powered robotic telescopes to track these rocks in real-time, and you can watch the feed on YouTube.
- NASA Eyes on Asteroids: This is a 3D real-time visualization tool. You can literally scroll through the solar system, find 2026 AS1, and see exactly where it is in relation to Earth and the Moon right now. It's basically Google Maps for space rocks.
- JPL Horizons: This is for the real nerds. It’s a text-based system where you can generate "ephemerides"—the exact coordinates—to know where the asteroid is located in the sky from your specific backyard.
The "Potentially Hazardous" Misconception
You'll often see the term Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) in headlines. It sounds terrifying.
Actually, it’s just a technical classification.
To be a PHA, an asteroid only needs to meet two criteria:
- It must be larger than about 140 meters.
- It must be able to come within 0.05 astronomical units (about 4.6 million miles) of Earth’s orbit.
2026 AS1 doesn't even qualify because it's too small. But even PHAs aren't necessarily "dangerous." It just means they are large enough to cause significant regional damage if they hit, and their orbits bring them "close" enough that we need to keep a very close eye on them over the decades.
Right now, as of January 18, 2026, there are 2,349 known PHAs. None of them are currently on a collision course.
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What Happens if a Big One Actually Heads Our Way?
We aren't just sitting ducks anymore.
Remember the DART mission back in 2022? NASA literally slammed a refrigerator-sized spacecraft into an asteroid moonlet called Dimorphos. They wanted to see if they could change its orbit.
It worked. Better than expected, actually.
We now know that we have the "kinetic impactor" technology to nudge an asteroid out of the way. The catch? We need years of warning. That’s why the live tracking we’re seeing today with 2026 AS1 is so vital. The better we get at spotting the small, faint ones, the more time we'll have if we ever find one with our address on it.
Your Space-Tracking Checklist for Today
If you want to stay on top of this flyby and others like it, here is how you should spend your next ten minutes:
- Check the Dashboard: Head over to the NASA Asteroid Watch site. It lists the next five close approaches. You'll see 2026 AS1 there, along with its size (compared to things like buses or skyscrapers) and its distance.
- Use the 3D Tracker: Open NASA’s Eyes on Asteroids. It’s a web app that works on your phone. Search for "2026 AS1" and watch the orbit animation. It really puts the "8.2 lunar distances" into perspective.
- Follow the Pros: Find the Virtual Telescope Project on social media or their website. If they are running a live stream for today's passage, that's your best bet for seeing a real image of the rock.
- Don't Panic: If you see a headline saying "NASA Warns of Giant Asteroid," look for the "Miss Distance." If it's more than 238,000 miles (1 LD), it's just a cool scientific event, not a reason to stock up on canned goods.
Space is big. Really big. And today, another piece of the cosmic puzzle is just passing through the neighborhood.