Today's episode of the Mo News podcast will have very limited commercial interruption brought to you exclusively by the American Petroleum Institute.

Hey, everybody, it is Tuesday, May 19th. You're listening to the Mo News podcast. I'm Mo Shwin-Nu. And I am Jill Wagner. This is the place where we bring you just the facts. And where we read all the news and read

between the lines so you don't have to. Jill, I don't know if you felt a whoosh last night.

The asteroid? Yes, yes. The asteroid, the size of a blue whale passed by Earth last night. You might

have felt a breeze. It has a very catchy name. It's called 2026 J-H-2 in case you were looking for baby name ideas, Moshe.

That's much more on the Elon Musk baby name than me, Jill.

So the space rock passed about 56,000 miles from Earth, which astronomers say is actually pretty close. In space terms,

super close. That is in between the moon and Earth and closer to the Earth side. Now, if you

hadn't heard about this, now that we, the astronomers only discovered this two weeks ago,

and they determined that, well, it wasn't going to hit Earth. But nonetheless, this was relatively close again in space terms.

Because everything in space is like light years and millions and billions and trillions of miles away.

So 56,000 miles, Jill, that is, well, I'm not going to call it too close for comfort, but pretty nearby.

Now, we should mention that there's a whole unit at NASA and as well as several other international countries that are constantly monitoring for the big ones, the ones that could end life on Earth.

And it turns out that even the size of a blue whale, relatively large there, that would not

end life on Earth. Now, if that was to impact Earth, certainly that would cause a significant

amount of damage, especially if you hit land, though one thing we like on Earth is that we're 70%

water. So the likelihood is you typically hit water. Nonetheless, NASA makes a priority, those very, very large rocks that would sort of send us the way of the dinosaurs. Those are the ones that were very closely monitoring up in the sky. These smaller ones, well, there's a lot of them out there. And so sometimes they don't see them until just, you know, a couple weeks away. So happy to say 2026, J.H.2. We'll see you later.

And by later, I mean, Jill, the year 2060, that is the next time it'll make a relatively

close approach to Earth. Leave us alone, J.H. 2026 or whatever your name is. The way space goes,

Jill, gravity. It makes its way around the sun every four years or so.

And whatever, it's going to be 30 plus years from now.

It'll hopefully come again and just sort of skate up.

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