Tuesday night the 2007TU24 asteroid is expected to pass by at approximately 334,000 miles of Earth, in a rare and close encounter with our planet for the first time in 2,000 years. The chances for the asteroid to hit Earth remain low despite the almost lunar distance its approach will have on January 29. The object will not be visible to the naked eye, but amateurs astronomers with medium-sized telescopes will be able to see it.

The asteroid was first spotted on October 11, 2007 by Catalina Sky Survey, Arizona, which estimated it to have 250 meters in diameter and a trajectory that removes the space object from the impact risk list, at least for the next 100 years. The 2007TU24 will have a relative speed of 9.248 km/s, but it is less likely for it to change trajectory and hit Earth. Such an impact usually occurs once in 37,000 years.

Steve Ostro, JPL astronomer and principal investigator of the Near Earth Object Observation project, said on the official NASA web site:  "With these first radar observations finished, we can guarantee that next week's 1.4-lunar-distance approach is the closest until at least the end of the next century. It is also the asteroid's closest Earth approach for more than 2,000 years."

The team of scientists, including Ostro, will make further radar observations of the asteroid from the National Science Foundation’s Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on January 27-28 and February 1-4. 7,000 object such as this have a close to Earth trajectory, but the chances for any of them to hit Earth are low.

The Near Earth Object Observation Program, also known as “Spaceguard”, discovers and analyzes objects passing by at a certain distance from our planet and calculates the chances for them to hit Earth and have potentially hazardous consequences. So far, NASA scientists have concluded there is no possibility for an object of this nature to hit Earth in the foreseeable future.